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A faster heart for F-Droid

f-droid.org

51–60 of 231 posts

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#52
post #41
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.

The issue isn’t the hardware, it’s the fact that it’s hosted somewhere private in conditions they wont name under the control of a single member. Typically colo providers are used for this.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#53
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but that’s not the last or only donation they’re receiving either.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#54
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#55
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shove it in a special someone's basement They didn't say what conditions it's held in. You're just adding FUD, please stop. It could be under the bed, it could be in a professional server room of the company ran by the mentioned contributor.

100%. Just as an example I have several racks at home, business fiber, battery backup, and a propane generator as a last resort. Also 4th amendment protections so no one gets access without me knowing about it. I host a lot of things at home and trust it more than any DC.

Isn't a business line quite expensive to maintain per month along with a hefty upfront cost? For a smaller team with a tight budget, just going somewhere with all of that stuff included is probably cheaper and easier like a colo DC.

> Also 4th amendment protections so no one gets access without me knowing about it

laughs in FISA

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#56
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.”

Yikes. They don't need a "special arrangement" for those requirements. This is the bare minimum at many professionally run colocation data centers. There is not a security requirement that can't be met by a data center -- being secure to customer requirements is a critical part of their business.

Maybe the person who wrote that is only familiar with web hosting services or colo-by-the-rack-unit type services where remote-hands services are more commonly relied on. But they don't need to use these services. They can easily get a locked cabinet (or even just a 1/4 cabinet) only they could access.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#57
I wonder if anyone knows about Droid-ify. Whether it it a safe option, or better to stay away of it?

It showed up one day while I searched about why F-Droid was always so extremely slow to update and download... then trying Droid-ify, that was never a problem any more, it clearly had much better connectivity (or simply less users?)

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#58
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…

Graphene is a great product but their incessant mud slinging at any service that isn't theirs is tiresome at best.

Some of their points are valid but way too often they're unable to accept that different services aren't always trying to solve the same problem.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#59
> not hosted in just any data center [...] a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services

This is ambiguous, it could mean either a contributor's rack in a colocation centre or their home lab in their basement. I'd like to think they meant the former, but I can't deny I understood the latter in my first read.

Also, no details on the hardware?

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#60
post #57

I wonder if anyone knows about Droid-ify. Whether it it a safe option, or better to stay away of it? It showed up one day while I searched about why F-Droid was always so extremely slow to update and download... then trying Droid-ify, that was never a problem any more, it clearly had much better connectivity (or simply less users?)

it's a different client using same servers. fdroid official client is just super buggy.
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