Directory servers for Anygenre1/2/3 down

[rdica]

It appears the directory servers for Anygenre1/2/3 are not repsonding to server registrations or providing server lists.

[rdica]

For the sake of availablity I'm offering to host a directory server for any genre(s). I'm amenable to providing access to @pljones and @corrados as well since they also host directory servers.

[ann0see]

Eventually, I would like to have these controversies resolved (I believed they were!). However, this shouldn't happen on GitHub, particularly not in this discussion.

[rdica]

There is no controversy, at least not on my part.
@mcfnord reacts to things he doesn't like and over which he has no control.
That has no impact on my continued contributions to Jamulus, my servers, and the player community I'm involved with.

Arguably the two largest player communities in North America, CBVB group and those on my servers, thrive despite his beliefs, activities on Jamulus, and his web site. I mention the CBVB group because, like his opposition to anything I do for Jamulus itself and the player community of which I'm a part, so too is his opposition to how they operate. This, and his overall disdain for those that pay for and manage servers, has been demonstrated on mulitple occassions on this discussion forum and by what servers he has decided to display on his web site ("open source principles" not in evidence).

I made a good faith offer to provide a directory server., with shared access with other directory admins. Transparency and stated requirements were not an issue. @mcfnord reacted negatively, even implying I would engage in some kind of blocking, and his personal "peace of mind" would be threatened. This is an unsubstantiated claim designed to foster a negative reaction. There is no access control desired to run a directory server, I know as I run one, and have multiple admins registering with it.
In any case, misinformed or deliberate, his reaction to my offer is telling, and indicative of far larger issues.

The problem appears to be his alone.

@ann0see and team, thanks for your consideration of my offer, and I look forward to continued and future contributions and participation.

[mcfnord]

this shouldn't happen on GitHub, particularly not in this discussion.

This is the proper place to discuss protecting the PII of our community. Plans that endanger PII really upset me, and I probably spoke with haste and alacrity about my concerns. I think you've been very clear on PII over many years. It hurt to hear you conclude that I ought not run the fancy directory server, because I handle thousands of IP addresses of our users today, and think I'm pretty stalwart and principled in their care. Furthermore, I suspect the directory instance is the best place to build defenses against the DDOS bot threat. But I am quite busy and did not relish the duty.

The forum rules specify that resolution must be sought, if it takes a minute or a year. It may be that a large controversy is unraveled through a sequence of smaller ones. This forum becomes essential in that pattern. But how might these controversies become resolved? I only offer that if I were not personally targeted for exclusion, I would not exclude those servers from visibility. The rest of these grievances happened three years ago. I would show up at a rock-off with my boys to settle this right and once and for all, but my calls go unanswered.

[ann0see]

@mcfnord @rdica Please E-Mail me, or better the team personally for a description what the accusations are - I don't have enough insight to "judge" or resolve anything. I'd like to hear both perspectives individually and then have a call with the involved people in future.

After the call, we should aim to produce a written statement which all parties agree on.

[ann0see]

It hurt to hear you conclude that I ought not run the fancy directory server, because I handle thousands of IP addresses of our users today, and think I'm pretty stalwart and principled in their care.

It's certainly nothing personal. I'm sorry if you felt hurt by this decision. Ultimately it was due to the fact that the situation is too unclear. We want to have a healthy community which means that the team should be as neutral as possible.

[dtinth]

There was an IP change; see: https://github.com/orgs/jamulussoftware/discussions/3468

[rdica]

Unless there was a second change, it doesn't explain the behaviour I saw Friday night with server listings being intermittent throughout the evening in US Eastern Time.

[corrados]

I think I can explain this. I checked my server statistics over the last couple of days. Right before the movement and change of IP address of my server there were already some short outages. It seems my provider had to do some preparations before the move of the server. So, the issue you saw was directly related to the move of the server.

-> EDIT: Sorry, I just saw that our issue happened "after" the move was done. So my explanation is not related to your issue.

[corrados]

Here is a screen shot of the network traffic and CPU usage of my directory server in the last week:

At least judging from the statistics, yesterday the servers were operating normally.

[rdica]

nod The stability issues are what prompted me to volunteer hosting a directory server wherever one was needed.
I had friends, and other players reaching out to me Friday night asking if jamulus was down. I explained the problem was temporary for the genres your server covers, but had to move my servers to rock genre so they'd be visible.

[iamthechrisb]

FWIW - I think this should stay in @corrados hands. A server can be run in NA just as easily as it can in the EU.

[ann0see]

Ok. I'd then argue that neither @rdica or @mcfnord should run a directory then. We'd stay like we currently are, however it still makes sense to have a discussion about global diversification.

[rdica]

Fair enough. It doesn't matter who runs one, just that the current instability is addressed, which is what prompted my offer to begin with.

[corrados]

I agree. It would be good to find the root cause of the issue. Maybe the change of the IP address of anygenre1.fischvolk.de caused the issue. As far as I know, it can take some time to distribute the change of IP addresses.

[corrados]

@rdica To debug this issue, if you experience registration issues again, please ping anygenre1.jamulus.io and check to which IP address this resolves. I would assume that it is the old IP address.

[mcfnord]

Thailand notoriously has problems due to distance from the UK. Hawaii seems like an ideal location based on user distribution.

[softins]

Regarding diversification, I was having a think about redundancy, and came up with the following ideas:

• A directory currently provides two distinct functions that overlap, but need not do so:
  1. A list of servers that have registered with it, including information to enable a client to find and connect to one of those servers.
  2. A Jamulus server itself, which is listed first in the server list it provides.
• All public directories except Anygenre1 are currently set so that their own server has a client limit of 1, because they are not intended to be used for jamming. Anygenre1 itself is also a server for up to 14 clients, I believe for historical reasons and maybe backward compatibility with very old clients that don't understand directories. I don't know if that is still relied on by any users. I often see people jamming on the Anygenre1 directory itself, but that may be by choice rather than old versions.
• We could separate those two functions by adding a command-line option to a server to make it only a directory, and if set, the directory would not include itself in the list of servers it gives out to a client.
• Once that separation is made, the list of servers could be shared between multiple redundant directories, as the data to be served would not be dependent on where it is stored or published. When a server registers with one of the redundant directories, the registration would be shared between the directories using some inter-directory protocol so that all the directories serving a particular list would stay in sync. This would need careful design.
• We could then use multiple IPs in the DNS for each directory, and a client would fetch the list from one of the IPs, and if it didn't respond quickly could try one of the others.

It's also worth discussing whether the effort of doing all the above is justified given how infrequently there are directory outages, notwithstanding that this week saw more than one. That is probably unusual.

[corrados]

A lot of things could be done. But do you really want to add such a complexity to Jamulus? Each new communication channel/protocol also introduces new possible ways of misuse and possible security/privacy issues. But I am no longer a decision maker for Jamulus and leave that totally up to you :-).

Keep in mind that even when anygenres were down, all the other lists were still available. Therefore, there is already some redundancy in directory servers today. Also, such a long outage has never (at least as long as I remember) happened before. For a free service as Jamulus is, its reliability in the past years were outstanding in my opinion. This not only refers to the server availability but also to the stability of the Jamulus software itself.

[softins]

A lot of things could be done. But do you really want to add such a complexity to Jamulus?

To be honest, probably not! I was just pondering possibilities :-)

[corrados]

FYI, there is another planned maintenance of my Jamulus server:

Planned Maintenance Window: Start: Sunday, April 20, 2025, 22:00 BST
End: Monday, April 21, 2025, 5:00 BST

Maintenance Details: As part of the preparations for the commissioning of our own Autonomous System (AS), a replacement and reconfiguration of the core routing is required. Therefore, network interruptions may occur during the above-mentioned time window.

[ann0see]

@corrados I believe it would make sense to open a new discussion on this (and pin it on the forum)

[corrados]

Makes sense: https://github.com/orgs/jamulussoftware/discussions/3491