Upgrading your access to the Matrix ????

There was one long-standing to-do left for the Attic Chat. Several bridges, and the registration page were still running in screens, started by cron on reboot. That works nicely enough, until one of those crashes. Screen will not restart that job. The WhatsApp bridge called for manual intervention more than once, so it was time to delve into the mysteries of systemd and get those apps running as services.

In retrospect, that was not that hard! Just synapse itself is still started by a cron job, since the service seems to keep itself online (or it is the most stable application I’ve ever seen).

While rearranging the intestines of Attic Chat, I noticed the Facebook bridge was severely out-of-date. The upgrade was easy enough (thank you, Mautrix!) but brought along some changes. It no longer connects to Facebook, but directly to Facebook Messenger. If anyone has been using the bridge, you will have to log on again. If you are using the cookie-login method, you need the cookie from www.messenger.com, no longer www.facebook.com. I found that out after about a million attempts to log on with the wrong cookie ???? Oh, and do follow the instructions about opening a private windows and closing it on the right moment!

Along with the daemonization of the bridges, I thought it would be a good idea to try out dynamic memory configurations for some Debian hosts (I have the hyperv-daemons running anyway). Not such a great idea, became clear. It seems the guest OS does report needed memory, the host assigns it, but the guest OS keeps seeing the startup amount of RAM. In no time, the VM has it’s maximum memory assigned while the guest is still starving for memory. That will need some more reading up, I guess…

So… it’s possible Attic Box and Attic Chat have not been very responsive today. Should be fixed in the meantime, apologies ????