feddit.de has been giving “Server error” for some time but I read that the server is still working when using a Lemmy app. Tried the Photon front-end today and choosing feddit.de as instance.
- Example post from All : https://phtn.app/post/feddit.de/12459995
- Example (German) post from Local, 3 hours ago : https://phtn.app/post/feddit.de/12475331
My question (I’m just curious, I have no account on feddit.de) is : Can an alternative front-end on their server co-exist with the other server software ? I guess it would be a matter of installing Photon and then point nginx configuration to that. Or am I missing something crucial ?
Fun fact: Old school admins used to write a large-ish (~5% hdd space) file of random data to the drive right after installing the server. If the hard drive ran full without anyone noticing, you could just delete the file to get some breathing room to deal with the issue. It’s a very crude alarm system, but one you WILL notice when it goes off even if you ignore all emails.
I’m slightly confused. They will notice it, but somehow it still happened without anyone noticing? I feel like I lost something in that text. 😅 What makes that trick such a good alarm system?
The alarm is that your server stops working, which you will definitely notice.
But you can get it working again simply by deleting the file.
lol okay. So that fixes nothing, except you’ll be able to get it running a bit faster, provided you’re even there to quickly react. But if this isn’t the case, like it wasn’t in the case of feddit, it’s exactly the same. No maintenance: server becomes unreachable/crashes just because there’s no disk space. Very fragile.
Oh well. Status quo, I guess.