Orpheus.network News

[Achelous]

The 2020 Autumn/Fall/Spring Equinox Update

The Next Contest!

We will be launching a new contest in the coming days, all that is needed are the final touches of polish on the code. Details will follow in a separate post, but in the meantime, keep in mind:

The contest will be backdated to the 21st of September, so you need not worry about having recently uploaded things not counted. By the same token, you need not restrain your uploading activity now to wait for the official opening.

The Orpheus 2020 Top 100

We will have a Top 100 list this year, based on your input!

Add your entry here: The Orpheus 2020 Top 100

.lrc files allowed

A minor change, but it was easy to implement. .lrc (Lyrics) file are now allowed in Music torrents. You may report a torrent if the lyrics are for another album, but quality (or lack thereof) does not form the basis of a valid report.

Upcoming changes

Logging in

The site is hammered constantly by people attempting to brute force passwords. You may have already received messages in your inbox saying that a failed attempt was logged on your account. If your password is short, simple or used elsewhere, you really should think about changing it.

The upcoming change in logging in is that instead of waiting for six bad attempts from a given IP address before blocking access for six hours, the delay will increase after the first failure: thirty seconds for one error, ninety for the second and then five minutes, fifteen minutes, three hours, six hours, one day...

If you have logged in previously from a specific address this escalation will not apply, however, you will still have to wait 30 seconds before trying again.

If you use a password manager, you should not even notice.

The upload page

The upload page has been redesigned so that the form fields are ordered in a more logical manner. If you miss a field, it will now nudge you to correct things instead of wiping out the contents. More work lies ahead, but the code has been greatly simplified, which makes further improvements easier to carry out.

A heartfelt thanks is extended to Beta team who have helped with testing and offering some excellent suggestions.

Upcoming maintenance

The tracker front end proxy will be switched to a more powerful server some time in October. It is fast running out of headroom to deal with SSL connections. This means that the IP address of the server will change.

If you have hard-coded the current address in an /etc/hosts file for whatever reason (e.g. due to flakiness from our DNS registrar, Njalla), now is the time to remove it.

Technical update

A few months ago, the final step in a major code overhaul was accomplished.

Gazelle stores torrent files in the database, in a table named torrents_files. The HTML rendering of CD log files is also stored in a column of another table. The storage of these two elements represents about 75% of the entire database.

The evolution we achieved is to pull this out of the database and store them as flat files on disk. As a result, the database shrank from about 64GiB to 16GiB. This is pretty amazing since, roughly, you need a server only a quarter as powerful as previously. Backups are also much faster and it takes much less bandwidth to copy the (encrypted!) dump from the database server elsewhere. rsync ferries the torrent and log files to another server for backups, and this too is now extremely quick, since only new files need to be added each day.

The code has yet to be released to Github, but we will also document the steps and point to commits to assist other people running Gazelle installations who wish to follow in our footsteps.

In the meantime, stay safe, wear a mask and listen to some music!


Orpheus staff

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