The Luon Network;

2025

2026-01-18T00:00:00+01:00

There were no posts on the website last year 😅, but that doesn’t mean that nothing happened!

A brief summary of changes in our services last year:

Gitea got replaced by Forgejo as our main Git service
Nextcloud got upgraded to version Hub 10
Matrix got support for the new video calling setup called Matrix RTC; this enables new style 1-on-1 and group calls in the newer Element clients such as Element X and Element Desktop/Web

The last point also relates to a change in the luon.net website to reflect that we now suggest to use the Element X clients on your mobile phone instead of the old Element (Classic) clients. Please switch if you haven’t already!

Jitsi Meet dropped

2024-01-16T00:00:00+01:00

We have (silently) dropped the hosting of our own Jitsi Meet service last week. The rather big resource costs did not weigh up to the infrequent usage.

Any alternatives?

As an alternative for group (video) calls, you could use Jitsi’s own public service on meet.jit.si, switch to something different like Element Call on call.element.io, or just create a public call via the Talk app in Luon Cloud.

What about Matrix/Element?

Our Element Web instance was configured to use our own Jitsi Meet service but will now use Jitsi’s public service instead. Android/iOS Element already used Jitsi’s public service. Note that one-to-one calls are still peer-to-peer without using Jitsi!

All Element clients are currently being modified to use Element Call instead of Jitsi Meet for group calls. We will also host our own instance of that in the future, but it is not just there yet. We will keep you posted!

Big Move

2023-12-04T00:00:00+01:00

As you all have noticed, we have successfully moved our servers from the Dutch hoster Bitency to a dedicated server at the German hoster Hetzner a few weeks ago.

Why? And does this mean?

We wanted, but couldn’t upgrade our servers at our old hoster because they stopped offering the dedicated server hosting service. So, with this move, we got our upgrade! The servers have more RAM and disk space now and finally use SSDs instead of spinning HDDs which makes our services, IMAP and Matrix in particular, much more responsive.

If you are hosting email services with us, nothing has changed and everything should still be working.

If you are hosting web pages or services, you’ll need to update your DNS records! Perform the following replacements for all records that match the IP address on the left:

A: 37.72.100.21 → 195.201.166.132
AAAA: 2a00:8240:5:10::21 → 2a01:4f8:13a:ee3::4

What’s next?

With more memory and disk space available, we are planning to move the Nextcloud service “Luon Cloud” from Void (at Paul’s home) to Torus (at the data center). It will make the service more responsive, more reliable and not bothered by internet connection or hardware outages.

This rather complex migration will happen over the next few weeks and it can be intermittedly unavailable. If the service seems down for a while, or you are unsure whether the service should be working properly, check our status page.

We will start with a partial move first. That is, the service will move to Torus, but all your data will stay on Void. This is because we don’t have hundreds of GBs available for y’all to use on Torus (yet). However, later, we will probably move the data to a storage server at Hetzner too.

Status Update

2022-12-18T00:00:00+01:00

Not much has changed over the year. But as a status update we present our new status page that shows the status and history of our services. You can find it at https://status.luon.net!

If services go down, notifications are sent to the sysops and to the Luon Users room on Matrix.

There is also a page for the status of services offered by our users. You can find that at https://status.luon.net/status/users. Let us know if you want to add a service and/or receive notifications.

Calling via Matrix, dropping Jitsi Meet

2022-03-14T00:00:00+01:00

At the moment, Matrix/Element supports one-on-one calls but relies on Jitsi Meet for group calls. Now that this is going to change in the future and native group calls are coming to Matrix, we are planning to phase out our Jitsi Meet installation. This is mainly because Jitsi Meet is quite a heavy system to keep up and running in parallel with Matrix.

So what does this all mean?

Calling another Luon user via Element (or some other Matrix client capable of calling) should work fine already!
Group calls with Luon people can still be done using Jitsi Meet (for now) or Nextcloud Talk
Calls with people outside of Luon can also be done the same way
As an alternative for calls, either with or without Luon people, you can use Element Call which is fully anonymous and end-to-end encrypted!
Once this group call support is merged into the Element clients, our Jitsi Meet instance will be shut down
We will host our own Element Call instance using our own Matrix server for calls with people outside of Luon

Recently we also have performed some maintenance to ensure that audio/video calls work well even if both parties are behind your router at home. This should greatly increase the reliability for calling via Matrix or Nextcloud talk.

More updates on all of this later!

Upgrade to Debian 11 (Bullseye)

2021-10-12T00:00:00+02:00

All our servers have been successfully upgraded to Debian 11 (Bullseye). This upgrade has impacted almost all our services except for the ones that already ran in their own container and were already up-to-date ( such as Gitea, Jitsi Meet and Nextcloud). Most updates are changes under the hood. However, the most striking visual change is in our webmail solution Roundcube.

If there are any issues since this updates, please let us know!

Hosting Git repositories using Gitea

2020-04-14T00:00:00+02:00

Last weekend Luon has launched Gitea as our service for hosting Git repositories at git.luon.net. Each Luon user has automatically access to this service and will be able to set up private and public Git repositories under their account as well as set up organisations to keep some repositories separate or collaborate more easily with others without giving access to your personal stuff. (An example organisation is Luon which hosts the (archived/old) original repositories hosted on git.luon.net.)

This Gitea service replaces the old Gitolite setup on Cube which was cumbersome to use because it had no web frontend, no easy way to do thing as pull requests as well as configure the SSH keys you are identifying yourself with. All repositories have been migrated from Gitolite to Gitea.

Gitea was chosen because it is very easy to set up and use while it still supports most of the features of the bigger competitors, such as Github and GitLab, support. Note however that it might be worth while to also push your repository to your account on either of these popular services to make your project more discoverable. Given the distributed nature of Git it is easy to set up another remote for these account or to push to two services simultaneously.

For more information about this service, see the service page.

Jitsi Meet service made available

2020-03-25T00:00:00+01:00

In reaction to recent the social distancing measures, we have set up a Jitsi Meet instance that can be used by everyone to do audio/video conference just from the browser. You can find our instance at meet.luon.net. There you can create your own conferencing rooms. The rooms includes support for chat, moderation, screen sharing and some more features. Other people can join you by going to the same URL, so sharing is easy!

There is also a “Jitsi Meet” Android and iOS app available for easy integration on your mobile phone in the respective app stores.

Soon, this feature will also be integrated in our Matrix setup so Jitsi Meet conference rooms can be associated with Matrix rooms. More on that later…

Note: We have set up some quotas and CPU/bandwidth limits because it is an open instance at the moment. In case it is slow or doesn’t work, let us know!

For more information about this service, see the service page.

Dropped some services

2020-02-21T00:00:00+01:00

After adding some new services and reworking the mail setup, some not really used services were planned to be shut down. Due to barely any usage, we have dropped the following services:

Luon Radio; – our radio station
Streaming/Iceast2 – our audio/video streaming services
Luon YubNub; – our (own) social command line for the web

More services are going to be dropped in the future, as the churn always goes, so stand by for that!

Matrix home server now available

2019-12-23T00:00:00+01:00

We have recently installed a Matrix home server and thereby joined this interoperable, decentralised, real-time communication network. See the Matrix homepage about what it precisely is and how it works, but it can basically function as a replacement for Slack/Whatsapp/XMPP/etc.

We host our own Element web client, which is available at chat.luon.net. However, you can use any Matrix desktop/mobile client or app you like. See this page for an overview of what exists. Every Luon user is free to start their own rooms on the Luon home server, or join rooms or start chats anywhere on Matrix.

Our Matrix server is located at matrix.luon.net. If you have a Luon account, you can immediately log in and use it. Our Matrix IDs are of the form: @user:luon.net.

Note: We currently have no bridges to IRC or other communication networks such as Discord/Slack/etc. installed, nor VoIP support or other integrations. For this, you will currently have to rely on Matrix’ own bridges and integrations.

Note 2: This installation is not completely definitive yet, but you can probably rely on us keeping it around.

Update @ 2020-08-13: The Matrix client “Riot” has been rebranded to “Element”.

For more information about this service, see the service page.