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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

#81

Post by timewizard »

stonogo wrote: post #72
timewizard wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

You are aware that adding backups and redundancy increases the costs both in hardware an management, right? I mean, _of course_ you can do that, it's computing.

Perhaps the comparison should be apples to apples when thinking about price.

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

#82

Post by echoangle »

weinzierl wrote: post #62
arghwhat wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're linking this everywhere, but it has absolutely zero relevance. Your beef is not with Hetzner, but whoever decided to run the service. Unless the customer violates local legislation or the hosting providers ToS, the appropriate action is to leave the service running, be it AWS, GCP or Hetzner. I would quite frankly have been very disappointed with them if they had done anything in response to you request.

There is no beef, just evidence that they do to run their service as professionally as other more established providers, which was the original argument and premise of the discussion. Hetzner is German company and subject to German law. The website they were hosting did not have the (in Germany) mandatory legal notice (Impressum) or any contact details. This shifts the responsibility to the provider (Providerhaftung)…

I think leaving disputes to the customer and only acting on legal orders is actually the most professional thing a provider can do.

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

#83

Post by reincoder »

When it comes to mirror sponsorships, we (IPinfo) offer IP location data sponsorship. We spoke with Alma Linux and they used our IP location data to route traffic for their mirror system: https://almalinux.org/blog/2024-08-07-mirrors-1-to-400/

At the moment, we operate 900 servers. We evaluated the idea of hosting mirrors on some of our servers, but our servers are not super powerful, and we have to pay for bandwidth. We use these servers in our production pipeline. Maintenance alone is a massive task, and hosting distro mirrors could be incredibly challenging. We are not at that scale yet.

We could provide IP location data sponsorship to popular distro mirror systems, which would make traffic routing and load distributions more effective.

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

#84

Post by jorams »

stonogo wrote: post #71
voxadam wrote: 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.

> This has been brought up with freedesktop and they handwaved it away. They claim they want to DIY with donation money

You are making all of this sound way more definitive than the ticket. The donation money approach is the personal opinion of the sysadmin. The OSUOSL is brought up, some explanations are added that make it more attractive and remove some doubts, and beyond that it's waiting for the board to decide what's next.

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

#85

Post by likeabatterycar »

zx2c4 wrote: post #36

The WireGuard project is also in the same situation, due to Equinix Metal shutting down. If anybody would like to host us, please reach out to team at wireguard dot com. Thanks!

What prevents Wireguard from moving to GitHub or why is bare metal hosting needed?

The code is small and integrated into the kernel at this point.

Aren't your needs primarily for distributing Windows/Mac packages at this point?

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

#86

Post by briffle »

zx2c4 wrote: post #36

The WireGuard project is also in the same situation, due to Equinix Metal shutting down. If anybody would like to host us, please reach out to team at wireguard dot com. Thanks!

have you looked into Oregon State University's Open Source Lab? https://osuosl.org/communities/

They host quite a few open source projects there. And seem to be one of the few that also hosts for ARM and POWERPC projects.

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

#87

Post by zx2c4 »

likeabatterycar wrote: post #85
zx2c4 wrote: post #36

The WireGuard project is also in the same situation, due to Equinix Metal shutting down. If anybody would like to host us, please reach out to team at wireguard dot com. Thanks!

What prevents Wireguard from moving to GitHub or why is bare metal hosting needed? The code is small and integrated into the kernel at this point. Aren't your needs primarily for distributing Windows/Mac packages at this point?

No, it's considerably more involved than that. For example, there's extensive CI: https://www.wireguard.com/build-status/ This thing builds a fresh kernel and boots it for every commit for a bunch of systems. And there's also a lot of long running fuzzing and SAT solving and all sorts of other heavy computation happening during different aspects of development. Development is a bit more than just pushing some code up to Github and hoping for the best.

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

#88

Post by zx2c4 »

briffle wrote: post #86
zx2c4 wrote: post #36

The WireGuard project is also in the same situation, due to Equinix Metal shutting down. If anybody would like to host us, please reach out to team at wireguard dot com. Thanks!

have you looked into Oregon State University's Open Source Lab? https://osuosl.org/communities/ They host quite a few open source projects there. And seem to be one of the few that also hosts for ARM and POWERPC projects.

Saw that. Looks appealing, but I'm not particularly keen on, "We only require that you keep one sudo-enabled account on the system for us to use as needed for troubleshooting." [1] Do I want to give root access to the project's master git server to somebody I've never met, who is probably a good & nice person, but not really directly associated with the project? In general, I'm wary of places with relaxed enough informal policies that somebody could just walk over to a machine and fiddle with it. It's not that I actually intend to do some kind of top secret computing on Internet-facing machines like those, but I also don't want to have to be _as_ concerned about those edge cases when I'm deciding which things to run or host on it.

[1] https://osuosl.org/services/hosting/details/

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

#89

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

mrweasel wrote: post #78
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #59

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.

You could host all of that on a single small VM or physical server.

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

#90

Post by Arnavion »

dehrmann wrote: post #66

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.

Maybe not every university, but plenty of distro mirrors are still hosted by universities, both in the US and internationally. Another example is Oregon State University mentioned elsewhere in this thread that still provides hosting + CI services; eg postmarketOS recently moved from gitlab.com to a self-hosted GitLab on OSU-provided and -hosted hardware.
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