While I was implementing a few more changes on my web server - mostly adding the sorely needed blacklistd configuration for sshd - I noticed that NGINX’s log was showing occasional errors when trying to contact the Isso process. They all had one thing in common, namely that they were all trying to contact ISSO via IPV6 as the server has both stacks enabled. Turns out that isso only listens on an IPV4 socket and I could not find an obvious way to get it to listen on both.

First, I apologise for not noticing that the comments had been broken for a while. This was entirely my fault and not fault of ISSO, which I’m still super happy with as a self-hosted comments system. So in this post I’m going to describe what went wrong, and also how I made the system a little more resilient at the same time.

First, what did go wrong?

My web server is using FreeBSD as its OS, with a bunch of software installed via FreeBSD’s ports system. For those not that familiar with FreeBSD’s ports, the system essentially acts like a rolling distribution. As a result, you sometimes have to upgrade tools, especially languages like Perl, Ruby, and in this case, Python. A little while ago, the default Python version on FreeBSD was upgraded from Python 3.7 to Python 3.8, and I eventually followed along with that upgrade. ISSO is run out of a virtualenv as a regular user and the virtualenv was still using Python 3.7, but I decided I didn’t want to keep multiple Python versions on this machine. So, I upgraded the version in the virtualenv to 3.8 as well. So far, so good, especially as ISSO seemed to restart without issue.

One “biggie” that was holding up this blog’s migration to a static site was getting a comments system up and running, followed by importing the existing comments. I had picked Isso a while back as it allows for easy import of existing comments from WordPress. I really didn’t want to depend on a third party comment hosting service like Disqus. I also didn’t want to use Staticman, mainly because it has dependencies on other services like Github or Gitlab. So Isso it was as that allows me to host everything on my own server.