Salamander

  • 2 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: December 19th, 2021

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  • By hand. We are only two people, and we usually clean after we cook/eat. When one is cleaning only 2 plates + a pot/pan at a time, it is easy to use little water. Spray of soap, metal scrub, sponge scrub, and then turn the tap on to rinse for a few seconds. Utensils get individually scrubbed and then all rinsed together for a few seconds.

    Maybe when we have kids a dish washer will make sense.






  • If you catch a frog in between your hands and quickly flip it around, you can get the frog into a kind of paralyzed state called ‘tonic immobility’.

    Here is a photo from Wikipedia:

    Frog stuck in tonic immobility

    OK, well, many years ago I was very interested in this phenomenon and decided to look into the literature.

    I found a paper from 1928 titled “On The Mechanism of Tonic Immobility in Vertebrates” written by Hudson Hoagland (PDF link).

    In this paper, the author describes contraptions he used to analyze the small movement (or lack of movement) in animals while in this state. They look kind of like torture devices:

    OK, but, that’s still not it… The obscure fact is found in the first footnote of that paper, on page #2:

    Tonic immobility or a state akin to it has been described in children by Pieron
(1913). I have recently been able to produce the condition in adult human beings.
The technique was brought to my attention by a student in physiology, Mr. W. I.
Gregg, who after hearing a lecture on tonic immobility suggested that a state
produced by the following form of manhandling which he had seen exhibited as a
sort of trick might be essentially the same thing. If one bends forward from the
waist through an angle of 90°, places the hands on the abdomen, and after taking a
deep breath is violently thrown backwards through 180° by a man on either side,
the skeletal muscles contract vigorously and a state of pronounced immobility
lasting for some seconds may result. The condition is striking and of especial
interest since this type of manipulation (sudden turning into a dorsal position) is
the most common one used for producing tonic immobility in vertebrates.

    Apparently this or a similar effect can be observed in humans too?! In this paper, the author himself claims to have done this and that it works! I tried to locate more recent resources describing this phenomenon in humans but I could not find them… Is this actually possible? If so, why is this not better documented? Or, maybe it is better documented but understood as a different type of reflex today? Not sure.





  • So, ultimately my problem was that I was trying to set all of the limits to what I thought were “reasonable” values simultaneously, and misunderstood what ‘Message’ meant, and so I ended up breaking things with my changes without the reason being obvious to me. I looked into the source code and I can see now that indeed ‘Messages’ refer to API calls and not direct messages, and that there is no ‘Direct Message’ rate limit.

    If I let ‘Messages’ stay high I can adjust the other values to reasonable values and everything works fine.

    Thanks a lot for your help!! I am surprised and happy it actually worked out and I understand a little more 😁


  • Thanks!

    I was able to crash the instance for a few minutes, but I think I have a better idea of where the problem is. Ths $emote_addr variable seems to work just the same.

    In the rate limit options there is a limit for ‘‘Message’’. Common sense tells me that this means ‘direct message’, but setting this to a low number is quite bad. While testing I eventually set it to ‘1 per minute’ and the instance became unresponsive until I modified the settings in the database manually. If I give a high number to this setting then I can adjust the other settings without problem.


  • Yes, I see this there. Most of the nginx config is from the ‘default’ nginx config in the Lemmy repo from a few years ago. My understanding is somewhat superficial - I don’t actually know where the variable ‘$proxy_add_x_forwarded_for’ gets populated, for example. I did not know that this contained the client’s IP.

        # backend
        location ~ ^/(api|pictrs|feeds|nodeinfo|.well-known) {
          proxy_pass http://0.0.0.0:8536/;
          proxy_http_version 1.1;
          proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
          proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    
          # Rate limit
          limit_req zone=mander_ratelimit burst=30000 nodelay;
    
          # Add IP forwarding headers
          proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
          proxy_set_header Host $host;
          proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        }
    
    

    I need to do some reading 😁


  • Thanks! Yes, I saw both messages and I am now going through the NGINX config and trying to understand what could be going on. To be honest, Lemmy is the hobby that taught me what a ‘reverse proxy’ and a ‘vps’ are. Answering a question such as ‘Are you sending the client IP in the X-Forwarded-For header?’ is probably straight forward for a professional but for me it involves quite a bit of learning 😅

    At location /, my nginx config includes:

          proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    

    So, I think that the answer to your question is probably ‘yes’. If you did have these rate limits and they were stable, the more likely explanation is that something about my configuration is sub-optimal. I will look into it and continue learning, but I will need to keep my limits a bit high for the time being and stay alert.




  • Thanks for the heads up. I don’t know what ‘Antiyanks’ is, but I already had to ban one comment spammer.

    The rate limits are indeed a bit confusing. The settings are:

    Rate Limit: X Per Second: Y

    I understand this to be ‘X for every Y seconds’

    So, a ‘Comments’ Rate limit: 10, Per second: 60, means a maximum of 10 comments per minute, correct?

    Maybe the reason you see 99999999 is due to troubleshooting. I have increased my instance’s limits multiple times while troubleshooting server issues, because the meaning of the settings was not clear to me. These limits are usually not the reason for the sever issue, but I put some high number and did not bring them back down after the issues were resolved.

    I have lowered them now to more reasonable numbers. I will also be more strict with new applications for the time being.