Entries posted in November 2017

For the past few years I've hosted a service for spam-testing blog/forum comments, and I think it is on the verge of being retired.

The blogspam.net service presented a simple API for deciding whether an incoming blog/forum comment was SPAM, in real-time. I used it myself for two real reasons:

• For the Debian Administration website.
  • Which is now retired.
• For my blog
  • Which still sees a lot of spam comments, but which are easy to deal with because I can execute Lua scripts in my mail-client

As a result of the Debian-Administration server cleanup I'm still in the process of tidying up virtual machines, and servers. It crossed my mind that retiring this spam-service would allow me to free up another host.

Initially the service was coded in Perl using XML/RPC. The current version of the software, version 2, is written as a node.js service, and despite the async-nature of the service it is still too heavy-weight to live on the host which runs most of my other websites.

It was suggested to me that rewriting it in golang might allow it to process more requests, with fewer resources, so I started reimplementing the service in golang at 4AM this morning:

• https://github.com/skx/golang-blogspam

The service does the minimum:

• Receives incoming HTTP POSTS
• Decodes the body to a struct
• Loops over that struct and calls each "plugin" to process it.
  • If any plugin decides this is spam, it returns that result.
• Otherwise if all plugins have terminated then it decides the result is "OK".

I've ported several plugins, I've got 100% test-coverage of those plugins, and the service seems to be faster than the node.js version - so there is hope.

Of course the real test will be when it is deployed for real. If it holds up for a few days I'll leave it running. Otherwise the retirement notice I placed on the website, which chances are nobody will see, will be true.

The missing feature at the moment is keeping track of the count of spam-comments rejected/accepted on a per-site basis. Losing that information might be a shame, but I think I'm willing to live with it, if the alternative is closing down..

Tags: blogspam, golang, node.js | 2 comments

I'm taking the month of November off work, so that I can exclusively take care of our child. Despite it being a difficult time, with him teething, it has been a great half-month so far.

During the course of the month I've found my interest in a lot of technological things waning, so I've killed my account(s) on a few platforms, and scaled back others - if I could exclusively do child-care for the next 20 years I'd be very happy, but sadly I don't think that is terribly realistic.

My interest in things hasn't entirely vanished though, to the extent that I found the time to replace my use of etcd with consul yesterday, and I'm trying to work out how to simplify my hosting setup. Right now I have a bunch of servers doing two kinds of web-hosting:

• 100% static-sites
  • As created with my static-site-generator.
• 100% dynamic-sites
  • Largely written with Perl & CGI.
  • Although I did recode my blogspam-detector in golang, and that's performing very well.

Hosting static-sites is trivial, whether with a virtual machine, via Amazons' S3-service, or some other static-host such as netlify.

Hosting for "dynamic stuff" is harder. These days a trend for "serverless" deployments allows you to react to events and be dynamic, but not everything can be a short-lived piece of ruby/javascript/lambda. It feels like I could setup a generic platform for launching containers, or otherwise modernising FastCGI, etc, but I'm not sure what the point would be. (I'd still be the person maintaining it, and it'd still be a hassle. I've zero interest in selling things to people, as that only means more support.)

In short I have a bunch of servers, they mostly tick over unattended, but I'm not really sure I want to keep them running for the next 10+ years. Over time our child will deserve, demand, and require more attention which means time for personal stuff is only going to diminish.

Simplify things now wouldn't be a bad thing to do, before it is too late.

Tags: personal | 3 comments