Meetups/Infra/2026-03-23

We talked MediaWiki at Noisebridge, user-use: reading, editing, templates, preferences; API-use. Wiki games. Jet presented Uptime Kuma in srs use & NoiseBell, Elan talked proxmox, OpenTofu, supporting strong OS opinions (incl own Talos interest)

bots bots bots

Introductions

• [name] - [background]. [goals for meetup, or interests to explore]

• Loren - data + platform engineering bg, share about mediawiki use + api (and games)
• Jet - Want to share engineered door bell
• Cole - software engineer, scripting, networking
• Max - went to school with cole
• Ciara - like kubernetes and things
• Save - likes infra
• Victor - works in
• Naomi - art and software
• Doug - likes computers
• Renault - interested in infra, software testing, works
• Heather - general web linux gal, ends up running servers on projects, no active interests at the moment
• sam - infrastructure, learning about kubernetes
• gwen - is here to learn
• riley - suffering from comcast, self hosting
• Dan - like the CLI
• Derek - programmer, thinking about the bots attacking our wiki
• Elan - hates doing things twice and refactoring old projects.

Lesson or Demo

• Read aloud: clarify for meetup. We are taking notes in a riseup pad (or I am--help appreciated, and links). We have meeting notes posted to the wiki. noisebridge.net, search Infra, or Meetups/Infra. (the Infrastructure page has a disambiguation link.)
• Shell, web services, self-hosting, networking!

Hack the Bay -- today -- talks

• Wiki

• First up

- Getting people signed up for the wiki. - Reviewing wiki requests - Media wiki

 What should be known about media wiki.
 One of the big standard wiki softwares, written in PHP.
 Majority of unique sites in wordpress.
 Uses what for linking to other pages on Wiki?
 Wikitext. double square brackets [[ ]]
 Source editing and visual editor available
 Who edited a page recently? (A: View history link)
 Mouse roll over behavior
 - preview, navigation popups, power user tool, pile of js.
   - uses API (bots also uses API)
 - how to look up what extensions are available
 - admin links is an extension
 
 * special version

- exploring the web API

special pages, api link, sandbox

- Let's say I want to edit the main page. It contains templates, {{ }}, some pages are protected, only editable by admin.

Is there an easier way to template?
Everyone things they do it the right way :D
But... everyone uses it different ways.
 
Creating new templates is rarer, but from the template page one can see instances.
Template can use other pages. Requires a lot of solo understanding

One convenience: A short template

Template:t {{t}}: This is the root page, of a collection of pages, as mw:help:subpages for easy, convenient use while editing. Include {{t/[subpage]}} to include reference instructional text in the page preview, Ctrl-Shift-p, while using source editing of wikitext.

Special:PrefixIndex/Template:T/:

• T/Help
• T/box
• T/box/note
• T/box/note/use
• T/collapse
• T/div
• T/div/end
• T/div/use
• T/expand
• T/fold
• T/linkshere
• T/new
• T/qr
• T/sp
• T/subpages
• T/users

More docs on deep wiki editor
Loren's (mcint) user page has tips.


https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox

- API is amazingly well documents
 category tree will autogenereate tree of categories, or also page leaf nodes.
 Wiki to html transformation
 
- Wiki media user's group helps build games from wiki data.
 Does query work?
 Forms and boxes for general requests.
 action=query lets you modify properties of the query
 categories property?
 list -> all categories.
 5MoF/year ... lots of them.
 applicant?
 aclimit?
 Can poke the API with /api.php?
 
 https://pandoc.org/try
 
 Format of the notes that we have
 M to N document format converter
 

- Wiki games!

 Wikiasteroids
 redactle - given a wikipage, redacts content wikipages not including stop words
 
 https://wikigamejam.org/sf-2026/ -- recent Wiki(Pedia) game jam. ...inspiration for us?
 https://playwiki.games/  -- lits of lots of games
 https://redactle.net/ -- guess words to reveal counts and position in redacted wiki page, until you can guess the title
 https://catfishing.net/ -- guess article name by categories alone
 

• • As a user, logged in, accounts
  • As api user / advanced use
  • Games (maybe at end)

• declarative sw, but also hw - elan

- Hello everyone says Jet

Uptime Kuma
downdetector.com, tracks only larger server
hosting your own infrastructure?
 - github, are you online?
   has been pinging for 5 months
   periods of time where requests would bounce of, can control requests rate.
   are requests coming in?
 - You can monitor other monitors
   reliable git
   other collections of uptimes
   - noisebridge
   - safespace.noisebridge.com (thanks Bjorn!)
   - when there is yellow, performance degrading
   - occassionally spikes to 50 seconds ping, (max ping)
   - emet unreached errors, 429, uptime kuma surgery hour

• Noisebell Demo - Jet

for the past three years there was an autobot callled spacejam created by 
project was esp32 attached to double knife switch
crashed because discord changed API
Jet created Noisebell, Caitlin created the logo
new hardware, raspberry pi.
couldn't query from outside internet
because pi was posting requests
attempts to scrape discord
Project got new attention march 2026
the new noisebell split into two parts
server has remote in hamburg, germany
debounce 50 ms
sends webhook to remote cache, the cache sends get requests through tail scale
noisebell.extremist.software/status  json/api

Three states: [open, offline, closes]
/status cmd : will get the current status
dynamic timestamp in discord.
considering RSS feed
Wouldn't it be possible if the wiki noisebridge page had the 

uptime kuma, 
Q: what is the metrics database?
A: possible sqlite

There is an alternative to uptime kuma that integrates really well with graphana, blackbird, graphana good for visualization

If anyone found noisebridge on google maps, stats for open/close were generated 6 months ago,

(violin plot of noisebridge open/close statistics)

• Elan Talks

proxmox instance hosts some services

strong opinions about operating systems
choose a base vm
run it, now automatically attaches to the tailnet setup as a remote service.
(elan is using atuin)
opentofu is great.
adds ssh keys, and more
running a service in a VM
digital infra @ git.ducky.noisebridge.net
two steps for removing instances, requires cleanup
- remove box from proxmox
- tailnet persists through restarts

Questions, Discussion, or Coworking

Enqueued Question (Dave): What is the overall / high-level architecture? - ie, what does the traffic -> mediawiki -> DB (plus missing bits) look like? https://excalidraw.com/#json=37DUmscNYrT14o1QF9Fkv,2yLAS5GmsfcpC1QqwPhGZQ

- I wonder if wiki-racing is still working? Yes, it's very popular, at least there are many copied implementations available..

• [Issue]

Outros

• Loren - cool to see Jet and Elan's projects with declarative stuff, getting shipped!
• Elan - interested in trying to get proxmox provisioning
• Derek - wikimedia has way more features than I thought, is there a firewall on the wiki server? or does Caddy have
• Dan - Tailscale cool, also RSS feed, why not put everything on RSS feed?.
• Riley - Throw away bit, don't have to learn media wiki
• Sam - Intested in the proxmox, messing around with that, on multiple VMs
• Robbie - interested in ducky, for git and NoiseGarden
• Doug - liked noisebell a lot, (Naomi says it will be able to turn out the lights)
• Robert - Liked the new noisebell, way better than the previous one.
• Victor - new to uptime kuma, keep hearing about proxmox, need to try it
• Dave - really appreciated the major project demonstrated, the bell was excellent.
• Max - opentofu stuff was cool, all of the projects demonstrated were cool, atuin, like the shiny tools, pretty colors.
• Cole - Liked the new noisebell setup!
• Jet - (Privacy laws) The government is trying to mess with you. See also German privacy laws.
• Naomi - (Relocate the noisebell server to the USA!) Has cookies.
• Ciara - learn more about opentofu, forked from terraform, relicensed a year ago that require people get a use license once over certain number of hosts, (something like elastic search, anticloud commercial license, not quite AGPL, use this unless selling to other people at another scale. Hashicorp got a lot of flak.

We won at redactle!

For next time

Readings & Exercises

• Readings
• Exercises

Join online

• Try it yourself!
  • Join libera.chat #nb-meetup-infra

https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Meetups/Infra