This month, the update on Magic Pages comes a little bit early. I will be traveling unexpectedly in the next few days due to a family matter, so the last week of August will be relatively quiet.
That doesn't mean I am not around, though. I might just take a little bit longer to respond. Feel free to send your emails and chat messages my way and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
✨ New Customer Portal (but it looks the same)
Remember a few months ago, when I told you that the customer portal has some authentication issues and is pretty buggy? Many of you have reached out to me about this.
It took a while, but the new customer portal is now finished and has been fully rolled out yesterday evening.
Chances are, you won't see any difference. But it will feel faster and well…actually authenticate you.
All external dependencies and third-party tools have been kicked out – so, instead of relying on standard software, it is not tailored to what Magic Pages needs.
Nice little byproduct: it's super easy for me to extend it now. So, look out for some really cool new features in the next few weeks and months (full-ite backups, anyone at the click of a button? 😉).
🧑💻 New Infrastructure (continued, continued)
The last two updates were about new infrastructure. As of yesterday, the migration has been completed 🎉
All trials are now also running on the new infrastructure, meaning that I can turn off quite a few servers. That is always an odd feeling. I know that nothing is running on these servers anymore…but what if there is something I need? The developers among you will probably know that feeling 😅
But hey, shutting down servers is only half the fun. While the main workload is built on pretty robust infrastructure now, I want to improve the MySQL database servers a little bit, as a next step. Right now, there are three servers, but only one is the "primary", whereas the other two are just there to replicate it.
That's great. In case the primary server goes bust, there are two other candidates to jump in right away. One of them will then become the new primary.
But it has one downside: the entire workload of over 200 Ghost CMS sites on Magic Pages (yay on that milestone 🎉) is concentrated on a single server, while two others are just standing by, doing nothing.
Next step: convert that cluster into a multi-primary cluster, where all three servers have equal responsibility. That way, the workload can be split more evenly.
So, things aren't getting boring here 😉
📬 Spam Request Filtering for all Magic Pages customers
If you're hanging around the r/Ghost subreddit, you might have seen a big uproad last week:
Someone registers multiple users on my self-hosted Ghost server, all with the same name, is that a hacker?
by u/bohlenlabs in Ghost
Lots and lots of Ghost-powered were flooded by spam requests, registering random email addresses with the name "adwdasddwa" through the magic links API. To this day, I am completely clueless as to what the goal of this attack is.
Ghost uses a two-factor authentication mechanism that doesn't give a potential spammer any information. The only thing that happens is that hundreds of people get random emails, not knowing what these are.
On Magic Pages, I have found hundreds of these requests in the database. And I got so annoyed by constant bounced emails, that I took action and rolled it out for everyone on Magic Pages:
Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki
All of your websites are now protected against this particular attack. So far, the filter I built in has literally filtered thousands of these requests 🎉
👻 What has happened on Ghost's side?
In the last month, Ghost has released quite a few minor bug fixes and improvements. No major additions have been released, so I am sure the Ghost team is working on the ActivityPub integration and other cool things.
So, that's it for August. Thank you all for your constant support!
As mentioned, I will be traveling for the next few days, so response times will be a bit slower. Nonetheless, feel free to send your messages my way, and I'll get back to you asap.
–Jannis