Rob Thomas [Admin m.au]

I push buttons and break things! I am the guy that runs mastodon.au (and mastodon.nz, and a few other things)

I live in Central QLD, and do FOSS stuff.

If you feel like donating, feel free to sponsor my open source work on GitHub

https://github.com/sponsors/xrobau

Public Key

npub1j4dskatym4ex5ekm67mfyjqr4mfyqlk0lpv8skhhc6ecdsc4q23qz6msv8

NIP-05 Address

xrobau@mastodon-au.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsf2kctw4jd6un2vmda0d5jfqp6a5jq0m8lskrcttmudvuxcv2s9gspz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43qzrmhwden5te0dehhxarj9ekk7mgapk8xq

Publishing to

relay.ditto.pub

nostr.mom

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1j4dskatym4ex5ekm67mfyjqr4mfyqlk0lpv8skhhc6ecdsc4q23qz6msv8

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Last Notes

2026-09-22 20:09:45 UTC

Phew. Well #MastodonNZ it looks like your database is mostly fixed. The only thing still being repaired is the stats table, which I ended up deciding to just rebuild from scratch. This means your post stats will be inaccurate for a day or so whilst all 170 million are recalculated.

2026-09-20 04:18:02 UTC

Any #PostgreSQL exports around to help me out here? After a storage server crash, I've ended up with (at least one) table having corrupt time data in it. There is, apparently, no way to pg_dump and ignore errors, and \COPY also doesn't appear to continue-on-error.
What I want to do is just get a list of the IDs of the rows with the corrupt time entries so I can either fix them, or just delete them.
This is the 'status_stats' table from #MastodonNZ, and has about 70m rows.
My current plan is that I've copied the schema of status_stats to status_stats_new, changing the time rows to just 'text' and I'm doing 'insert into status_stats_new select * from status_stats ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING;' then a left join to find missing ones.
IS THERE A BETTER WAY? Halp!
#nevent1q…etq3

2026-09-04 04:20:46 UTC

Please boost for visibility! If you are running a #Mikrotik router or switch, upgrade it now. Right now. The fixed releases are 7.23.4 (long-term), 7.24.2 (stable) and 6.49.21. If you are running a version less than that, there are multiple entrypoints for a complete unauthenticated remote code authentication.
This is as bad as it gets, upgrade and reboot now. Yes, you'll have an outage for a few minutes, but it's better than the alternative.
#router #ipv4 #ipv6

2026-08-09 01:41:36 UTC

Sorry about that long-ish outage, but we were YET AGAIN getting smashed by AI bots. I have given up fighting them, and I'm just scaling up until #mastodonAU can handle the load. This time the #PostgreSQL database was running at a load of 100+ because it was disk IO bound. I did *try* to live migrate it, but it was just insanely slow so I made the call to shut it down (hence the 'Something went wrong' errors) and move it offline. It's moved. Now it's running on a pure SSD-only backing store, which hopefully will handle everything the #AI scrapers throw at us.
I'll be doing the same thing with #MastodonNZ too, shortly (but hopefully without the outage, as that's a much more lightweight instance)
I also really need to fix the status page that comes up when mau is down.

2026-07-30 02:55:23 UTC

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@nprofile…7r9s if you want to get the current admin to reach out to me, I rescue closing instances and host them for free.. If the current admin wants, get them to reach out to me.

2026-07-15 01:26:16 UTC

For those that noticed the #MastodonAU / #MastodonNZ outage, a quick post mortem: Power failed. UPS ran for a few mins, then generators kicked in. When the generators kicked in, two out of three servers decided that their UPS-fed power supplies should be sacrificed to the gods of 240v. No idea why. Those two out of three servers lost power, and then didn't fail across properly, and I had to do a bunch of manual fixing. Power supplies have been replaced, and we'll be switching OFF generator in a few hours. Let's see what happens.
https://o.mastodon.au/media_attachments/files/116/921/377/101/430/170/original/e680b0278d155593.png

2026-04-07 23:27:12 UTC

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@nprofile…unhv @nprofile…xpw3 @nprofile…wj33 @nprofile…t3ug 503's are when AI bots are beating the crap out of the service. I've completely blocked singapore, which fixed 90% of it, but I've decided that when there's 1000 requests coming in per second from AI bots, it's much less stress for me to just accept they're going to destroy everything. They give up after an hour or so, usually.

2026-03-29 11:55:42 UTC

JP Morgan have done their calculations, and they say April 20 is when the #fuel will stop arriving in #Australia. That's unexpectedly bad.
Source and more info https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-map-shows-a-crude-ticking-time-bomb-that-hits-much-of-the-worlds-oil-supply-in-april-2c058db6
#iran #war #oil
https://o.mastodon.au/media_attachments/files/116/312/328/421/228/704/original/415f646f5900ed13.jpg

2026-03-03 09:54:06 UTC

It begins! #eclipse
https://o.mastodon.au/media_attachments/files/116/164/633/559/277/064/original/5411e729f0c6e7f2.jpg

2026-01-02 23:35:42 UTC

Oh FFS, one of my tyres has been Slashed.
https://o.mastodon.au/media_attachments/files/115/828/120/328/408/876/original/7a33468dd0316ba1.jpg

2025-10-26 20:12:05 UTC

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@nprofile…wcg4 @nprofile…vca0 Just the normal thing, AI bots DDOS'ing the site.

2025-05-10 22:00:56 UTC

I dunno what happened on Friday, but the AI bots came out in force attacking #mastodonau on friday. Sigh. #mastodon #stopaibots
https://o.mastodon.au/media_attachments/files/114/485/779/887/827/227/original/8687fb806d56aa18.png

2025-04-03 06:09:50 UTC

Sigh. You can tell when #mastodonau is being crawled by one of the #AI consumers by how long it takes to do stuff. When it's being left alone, everything is pretty much instant. When there's *three* crawlers attacking us at the same time, it takes 10-15 secs to do anything.
I promise I'm doing everything I can to stop them, but they don't listen to policy and authentication, so I have to manually blacklist things when I notice them. Feel free to @ me if mau is running slow, and I'll get the firewall filters out. #mastodon #screwyouai #stopmakingeverythingslow #openai

2025-01-21 08:33:32 UTC

Good news, Everyone! We now have our own #PixelFed (aka, #Instagram without the spam!) instance.. It's at https://yourpix.au - enjoy! #mastodonau

2024-11-23 04:12:45 UTC

Oh I probably should mention that I am FINALLY ready to upgrade Mastodon.au to 4.3 - I've (hopefully) fixed the other bugs, but I have to do a database backup first. NORMALLY I would just yolo it, but this is a pretty major change so.. It's pg_dump time. #mastodonau #mastodon

2024-05-30 20:32:57 UTC

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@npub156e…epw9 It always does downsize them. You'll be surprised how small, in bytes, they are. Right click, download, and you'll see. The big ones are videos.

2024-05-14 22:38:43 UTC

We've figured out WHY everything has been slow the last few days - we're running out of disk space. To make it worse, we are going to have to buy some new storage hardware - specifically, something like https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/175878861604 - which is going to be about $2500 delivered to 4680. If anyone feels like throwing a few bucks in the kitty to help us buy it, please send me a message (here, facebook, gmail, I'm pretty much xrobau everywhere!)

2024-04-23 22:26:29 UTC

After promising SEVERAL times to fix #MastodonAU 's translate server, it's finally fixed. This *may* have been what's been causing the random 503 errors if your profile was set to auto-translate posts.

2024-03-03 10:46:24 UTC

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@npub156e…epw9 something is causing it to just return errors for about 7 minutes. Then it's fine. I still don't know why. Today was rebuilding a rack of computers to prepare to rebuild all of mau on new VMs and databases etc.

2023-06-16 06:00:42 UTC

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@npub156e…epw9 @npub1p55…8lyq Pixelfed is just part of the fediverse. I'll have a think about it over the weekend, but I'm still rebuilding a bunch of stuff that caused the outages.