Author name: Dave

Dalek Zone has been down for the last 24 hours while Ben was moving to a new Internet service provider (and, therefore, a new IP address). The process is now complete and the necessary configuration changes have been done. The server has also moved out of Ben’s basement and into deluxe lodgings in his server room… See the picture below:

So the instance’s life should return to normal now, and the server has better cooling than in the garage:

Other news is that PeerTube has been upgraded to v8.0.2 cloned from Github. That new minor version step up from v8.0.0 has resolved a few bugs issues that shipped with it. Also, since I cloned the code base and then built it myself rather than getting a pre-built installation, I can make clean edits rather than dirtily hacking built files.

This should resolve a problem reported by Saruya whereby people using a browser set for a language other than English could not access the site content.

If you happened to notice that emails sent from Dalek Zone were delivered to your mailbox with black text on a black background, that’s now been remedied and messages will now be readable.

We’ll be working on upgrading the live chat feature to fully federate with other chat-supporting instances in the PeerTube network. Until present, live chat was restricted to within Dalek Zone. Now you’ll also be able to communicate with users on other nodes. I’ll post an update when that work is finished.

Also, you can now do your live-streaming via secure RTMPS on port 1936, in addition to plain-vanilla RTMP on port 1935.

That’s about all I can tell you right now. Enjoy, guys, and please do let me know if you notice something to repair.

TL;DR: PeerTube has been updated from v6 to v8 – a big jump forward, but there are lots of new features and the whole user interface is much better.

Just before New Year, just hours from New Year, I had the brilliant notion that it was about time to update PeerTube on Dalek Zone. We’d been on v6.3.3 for a long time, mostly because we had a kind-of format on the home page and in the sidebar that made it possible to promote the channels of local account holders. The new look of the site is rather different, there won’t be a long column of links in the sidebar anymore. Instead, we’re going to have a new and thoughtfully designed home page that does the job better.

The actual upgrade was pretty tough. Dalek Zone hosts quite a volume of content – it’s coming up to 2 Terabytes now. That made the processes of database reconstruction very long. Also, there were new versions of all the software from which PeerTube is built. The final steps of the upgrade are still in progress, and it’ll take a few more days before the site returns to a stable state.

But now we have this shiny new blog, and I’ll be able to keep you in the know. The home page of the Dalek Zone Blog – which, obviously, you’re reading now – now points straight to the latest blog posts. The blog is actually on a different server to the one hosting PeerTube, so it should still be reachable even if our PeerTube server temporarily goes down.

The new PeerTube v8 was installed from the code on Github and then built manually. Unfortunately, it had to be that way because going from v6 to v8 was too much of a leap to be sure that an update script would work without problems.

That makes me look back and realize that Dalek Zone has been on the Web for about 3 years now.

Anyway, that’s what I got for you at the moment, but I should be back with more news very soon. Oh, and Happy New Year by the way!