so recently my server has unintentionally been inside a DDoS of my own making. any smaller webserver i point my domain at becomes instantly crippled. let me explain the situation...
so i make minecraft mods, right. well, at one point, i made this library mod called CICADA, that has a bunch of shared utilities i use. this is pretty common practice
then once i had that, i realized, hey! why not make a funny thing in this library mod that gives my own minecraft character a cape when anyone sees me! that would be kinda neat.
it couldnt just be simply hardcoded though of course, so i had a genius plan. i would put a simple "api" of sorts up on github pages that would have directories for all the players that i want to have capes. the mod can do a quick http request in the background, and if it doesnt return a 404, load the cape from the png thats returned to display on the player
now you might wonder, this is a perfect idea is it not? how could this possibly have caused any issues? ...yea i think you can roughly guess where this went
for the github pages thing, i used the one domain i had available at the time: enjarai.dev. now, you may notice that this currently hosts my personal website. which is no longer on github pages.
when i made this migration, i realized something quite concerning. my mods are popular.
my servers cpu was consistently pinned at 100% over 4 cores, and i was getting... checks notes thousands of GET requests a second. 24/7. neither me nor my server were very happy about this as you might imagine
for quite a while, i've honestly just kinda... put up with this. there didnt seem to be anything i could do, short of just not using my domain or migrating back to github, neither of which i wanted
its been getting worse and worse though, my disk is filling up with access logs within literal hours after clearing them (so i had to disable those) and im running out of bandwidth quota on my VPS every month. something needs to change
so i shared my problem with a bunch of friends last night, and we brainstormed the hell out of this. after a lot of ideas, including potentially sending malformed PNGs to crash people's games and force them to update the mod (which turned out not to be feasible), i landed on a pretty decent solution i think
everyone using an old version of CICADA will now see this cape. on every single player
i really hope this works, cause if not, im kinda out of ideas
will keep yall posted
reposting here because someone sent this to me and i realised how much i needed it actually
my girlfriend found the absolute cutest thing today and i cant not share
realized yesterday that my minecraft esolang magic mod has all the functionality required to implement a full network stack.
one thing led to another, and now we have a data-link layer with frames and fully functional switches made of magic circles.
Aha! My instance is alive!! It's quite the miracle. NGINX is evil.
more friends are becoming dependent on my infra. i hope ill be able to keep managing it properly... responsibility is scary
by browsing through some nix options, i noticed nginx has a so-called proxy protocol. this protocol can wrap an undecrypted https connection to provide proxy context to downstream servers
this is exactly what i needed and im so happy rn 
did you know that i am a genius actually?
quick federation test. just put my sharkey instance behind iocaine. please interact with this post 
i want to start hrt already...
women
my home network is so weird sometimes. most things work fine most of the time, but sometimes i just cant connect to things? but only some things.
like, my browser will be just fine connecting to websites, but a command line application wont be able to open a connection to for example download a youtube video. or a connection to a game server will be fucked while im in voice chat with friends just fine
the absolute weirdest part is that using a vpn makes the issues go away! somehow tunneling the connections over another connection makes it fine actually?
its usually something i can work around (restarting my router often helps too) but its just so weird
i need more plushies...
so recently my server has unintentionally been inside a DDoS of my own making. any smaller webserver i point my domain at becomes instantly crippled. let me explain the situation...
so i make minecraft mods, right. well, at one point, i made this library mod called CICADA, that has a bunch of shared utilities i use. this is pretty common practice
then once i had that, i realized, hey! why not make a funny thing in this library mod that gives my own minecraft character a cape when anyone sees me! that would be kinda neat.
it couldnt just be simply hardcoded though of course, so i had a genius plan. i would put a simple "api" of sorts up on github pages that would have directories for all the players that i want to have capes. the mod can do a quick http request in the background, and if it doesnt return a 404, load the cape from the png thats returned to display on the player
now you might wonder, this is a perfect idea is it not? how could this possibly have caused any issues? ...yea i think you can roughly guess where this went
for the github pages thing, i used the one domain i had available at the time: enjarai.dev. now, you may notice that this currently hosts my personal website. which is no longer on github pages.
when i made this migration, i realized something quite concerning. my mods are popular.
my servers cpu was consistently pinned at 100% over 4 cores, and i was getting... checks notes thousands of GET requests a second. 24/7. neither me nor my server were very happy about this as you might imagine
for quite a while, i've honestly just kinda... put up with this. there didnt seem to be anything i could do, short of just not using my domain or migrating back to github, neither of which i wanted
its been getting worse and worse though, my disk is filling up with access logs within literal hours after clearing them (so i had to disable those) and im running out of bandwidth quota on my VPS every month. something needs to change
so i shared my problem with a bunch of friends last night, and we brainstormed the hell out of this. after a lot of ideas, including potentially sending malformed PNGs to crash people's games and force them to update the mod (which turned out not to be feasible), i landed on a pretty decent solution i think
everyone using an old version of CICADA will now see this cape. on every single player
i really hope this works, cause if not, im kinda out of ideas
will keep yall posted
my girlfriend found the absolute cutest thing today and i cant not share
Evelyn :spinny_cat_trans: :spinny_cat_lesbian: