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A faster heart for F-Droid

f-droid.org

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Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#41

Post by cyberax »

mcsniff wrote: post #13

Ugh. This 100% shows how janky and unmaintained their setup is. All the hand waving and excuses around global supply chains, quotes, etc...it took pretty long for them to acquire commodity hardware and shove it in a special someone's basement and they're trying to make it seem like a good thing? F-Droid is often discussed in the GrapheneOS community, the concerns around centralization and signing are valid. I underst…

I read it a bit differently: you don't need to be a mega-corp with millions of servers to actually make a difference for the better. It really doesn't take much!

Also, even 12-year-old hardware is wicked fast.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#42

Post by [deleted] »

lrvick wrote: post #17
mcsniff wrote: post #13

Ugh. This 100% shows how janky and unmaintained their setup is. All the hand waving and excuses around global supply chains, quotes, etc...it took pretty long for them to acquire commodity hardware and shove it in a special someone's basement and they're trying to make it seem like a good thing? F-Droid is often discussed in the GrapheneOS community, the concerns around centralization and signing are valid. I underst…

As someone that has run many volunteer open source communities and projects for more than 2 decades, I totally get how big "small" wins like this are. The internet is run on binaries compiled in servers in random basements and you should be thankful for those basements because the corpos are never going to actually help fund any of it.

[deleted]

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#44

Post by lrvick »

skiing_crawling wrote: post #9
valgaze wrote: post #4

Hmm: “F-Droid is not hosted in just any data center where commodity hardware is managed by some unknown staff. We worked out a special arrangement so that this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. We can control it remotely, we know exactly where it is, and we know who has access.”

I never questioned or thought twice about F-Droid's trustworthiness until I read that. It makes it sound like a very amateurish operation. I had passively assumed something like this would be a Cloud VM + DB + buckets. The "hardware upgrade" they are talking about would have been a couple clicks to change the VM type, a total nothingburger. Now I can only imagine a janky setup in some random (to me) guy's closet. In…

> It makes it sound like a very amateurish operation.

Wait until you find out how every major Linux distributions and software that powers the internet is maintained. It is all a wildly under-funded shit show, and yet we do it anyway because letting the corpos run it all is even worse.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#45

Post by lrvick »

Aurornis wrote: post #35

> this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. We can control it remotely, we know exactly where it is, and we know who has access. I can’t be the only one who read this and had flashbacks to projects that fell apart because one person had the physical server in their basement or a rack at their workplace and it became a sticking point when an argu…

400K would go -fast- if they stuck to a traditional colo setup. Donations like this are rare and it may be all they get for a decade.

Personally I would feel better about round robin across multiple maintainer-home-hosted machines.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#46

Post by anticorporate »

It's frankly embarrassing how many of the comments on this thread are some version of looking at the XKCD "dependency" meme and deciding the best course of action is to throw spitballs at the maintainers of the critical project holding everything else up.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#48

Post by pilif »

lrvick wrote: post #45
Aurornis wrote: post #35

> this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. We can control it remotely, we know exactly where it is, and we know who has access. I can’t be the only one who read this and had flashbacks to projects that fell apart because one person had the physical server in their basement or a rack at their workplace and it became a sticking point when an argu…

400K would go -fast- if they stuck to a traditional colo setup. Donations like this are rare and it may be all they get for a decade. Personally I would feel better about round robin across multiple maintainer-home-hosted machines.

400k would last me 13 years for a rack, power and 10Gbit/s bandwidth at my colo place (Switzerland, traditionally high prices)

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#49

Post by dotancohen »

pilif wrote: post #48
lrvick wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

400K would go -fast- if they stuck to a traditional colo setup. Donations like this are rare and it may be all they get for a decade. Personally I would feel better about round robin across multiple maintainer-home-hosted machines.

400k would last me 13 years for a rack, power and 10Gbit/s bandwidth at my colo place (Switzerland, traditionally high prices)

Yes, but that's not their only expense.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#50

Post by Aurornis »

lrvick wrote: post #45
Aurornis wrote: post #35

> this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. We can control it remotely, we know exactly where it is, and we know who has access. I can’t be the only one who read this and had flashbacks to projects that fell apart because one person had the physical server in their basement or a rack at their workplace and it became a sticking point when an argu…

400K would go -fast- if they stuck to a traditional colo setup. Donations like this are rare and it may be all they get for a decade. Personally I would feel better about round robin across multiple maintainer-home-hosted machines.

> 400K would go -fast- if they stuck to a traditional colo setup.

I don’t know where you’re pricing coloration, but I could host a single server indefinitely from the interest alone on $400K at the (very nice) data centers I’ve used.

Collocation is not that expensive. I’m not understanding how you think $400K would disappear “fast” unless you think it’s thousands of dollars per month?

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