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Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

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Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#71
post #41

Oregon State University's Open Source Lab ( https://osuosl.org/ ) offers managed and unmanaged hosting to open source projects. They even have IBM Z and POWER10 hosting if you're into that sort of thing.

This has been brought up with freedesktop and they handwaved it away. They claim they want to DIY with donation money but they don't have a donation mechanism and I suspect they don't know how much work just handling money is.

Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I did, of course. Storage is MUCH cheaper when you colo, and bandwidth requirements are a large part of why you colocate instead of just running servers out of an office building that has at least two upstream connections. I'm really curious what you think they're using now. Certainly you read the article... It says they're using bare metal servers. That's basically colo where the provider owns, but doesn't cont…

> Storage is MUCH cheaper Probably because it's not redundant or automatically backed up at any interval. The worst days of my life have been during hardware failures at colos.

You are aware that backups and redundant storage existed before the cloud, right?

Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#73
>Both services have largely depended on free server resources ...

Running on 'large donations' is not a viable strategy for any long-term goal. Perhaps its time for Linux to consider running a tiny datacenter of its very own to both dog-feed itself and give itself extra momentum or inertia from donation stall-out?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food

Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#74

Broader question, but whatever happened to every university with a CS department hosting mirrors of popular distros? I always assumed CDNs replaced them, but seeing this, maybe they didn't.

FWIW in Italy we still have [GARR Mirror](https://mirror.garr.it/index_en.html). It includes Alpine Linux.

Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#75

Oh man that sucks! I wonder if we could pull Alpine into our colo, we recently upgraded to a full rack from 2U (it was cheaper than a quarter rack!) and have a ton of space. Plus all of our libvirt/KVM HVMs run Alpine.

It's surprising to me that Alpine isn't set for life from corporate donations. They're my first choice for laying down the foundation in a container.

Aside from some major examples, like most of the big tech companies funding the Linux kernel and maybe the Rust and/or Python Foundations in decent numbers, for the most part, corporations don't pay for open-source. That's why they love it so much: it costs ~$0, but generates immense business value for them (in that they don't have to write, debug, or maintain any of that, often essential, code or infra).

I can think of maybe three exceptions my entire career, and none of them were especially huge contributions.

Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#76
post #71
post #41

Oregon State University's Open Source Lab ( https://osuosl.org/ ) offers managed and unmanaged hosting to open source projects. They even have IBM Z and POWER10 hosting if you're into that sort of thing.

This has been brought up with freedesktop and they handwaved it away. They claim they want to DIY with donation money but they don't have a donation mechanism and I suspect they don't know how much work just handling money is.

They offer colocation as well.

https://osuosl.org/services/hosting/details/

Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I did, of course. Storage is MUCH cheaper when you colo, and bandwidth requirements are a large part of why you colocate instead of just running servers out of an office building that has at least two upstream connections. I'm really curious what you think they're using now. Certainly you read the article... It says they're using bare metal servers. That's basically colo where the provider owns, but doesn't cont…

> Storage is MUCH cheaper Probably because it's not redundant or automatically backed up at any interval. The worst days of my life have been during hardware failures at colos.

NAS is cheap -truenas will sell you 200 TB systems for under $10k, and you can run your web server in a VM. Put second one in a different location and set them to up with the right backup and you have most of what you need. You can probably do much cheaper depending on your needs.

What I don't know is how to make your web servers failover graceful if one goes down (the really hard problem is if the internet splits so both servers are active and making changes). I assume other people still know how to do this.

With the likes of AWS they tell you the above comes free with just a monthly charge. Generally open source projects like having more control over the hardware (which has advantages and disadvantages) and so want to colo. They would probably be happy running in my basement (other than they don't trust me with admin access and I don't want to be admin - but perhaps a couple admins have the ability to do this).

Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#78

Why is this stuff not primarily hosted via bittorrent, now? Even Microsoft updates can use end user device distributed hosting.

How do you host bug trackers, git repos, CI runners or mailinglists on Bittorrent?

Admittedly I am rather surprised by the storage requirements from Freedesktop.

Re: Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I did, of course. Storage is MUCH cheaper when you colo, and bandwidth requirements are a large part of why you colocate instead of just running servers out of an office building that has at least two upstream connections. I'm really curious what you think they're using now. Certainly you read the article... It says they're using bare metal servers. That's basically colo where the provider owns, but doesn't cont…

> Storage is MUCH cheaper Probably because it's not redundant or automatically backed up at any interval. The worst days of my life have been during hardware failures at colos.

I'm puzzled about why you'd suggest such an obviously silly thing.

Purchased, fully redundant storage is MUCH cheaper than anything in the cloud when talking about any time frame of a year or more.

Obviously you can "rent" storage for a month for less than the cost of purchasing it, but only idiot startup CTOs try to argue a comparison like that.

Two sets of storage are still cheaper, and we all have rsync.

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