Hey guys, just installed two instances of peertube this week and I wanted to test out how follows worked with my own instances before I started to allow other instances to follow me or I follow other instances. I think I must be missing something because after having both instances follow each other and I couldn’t see any new videos on either instance.
I was looking through the settings and the only thing that I thought could give this functionality is the ‹ global search › option. Is this what you have to use to be able to view content from followed instances? It sounds like it will show more than just what you have followed.
Edit: just wanted to add that both are currently running the newest version of peertube at 3.1.0
One is a docker install and one is a system wide ubuntu install.
Are they showing pending or accepted when you pull up your federation partners in administration?
They were showing accepted, but I realized what the issue was and I want to give some tips to future googlers as to how I determined what the issue was. The best way to figure out what’s going on with peertube is to look at the logs, which I hadn’t done at the time when I made this post. Logs are displayed under Administration → System → Logs. I found the standard logs had the information I needed. So what I did was, on both instances, unfollowed each other and made a follow request to one from the other. From the instance that made the follow request, I checked the logs and jobs for that instance. It starts a job called « activitypub-http-fetcher » which I believe is crawling through the followed instance to give the main instance knowledge of where videos are at in the followed instance. So that job was failing for me. It was failing with a timeout error, which displayed in the logs as well as in the job.
This, for me, is most likely because both instances are on the same LAN and my LAN has trouble resolving domain to LAN, so it fails with a timeout. I can reproduce this by just trying to hit the domain on my LAN and I have the same issue. To test if that was the issue, I followed a different instance and saw that the activitypub-http-fetcher job was not failing.
Now, to really test it I’ll have to figure out how to add NAT resolution into my LAN. My current router does not support it so I will have to install a new router.
Sometimes it is easier to install a DNS server, that resolves your domain with local IPs, and use this server for resolution on your local servers.
Yeah, this is the way I’m going to go eventually. My interim solution was to just add the domain to /etc/hosts