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A faster heart for F-Droid

f-droid.org

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Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#111

Post by secabeen »

skiing_crawling wrote: post #21
AndrewDucker wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a single server why would you use cloud services rather than go the self-owned route?

A "single server" covers a pretty large range of scale, its more about how F-droid is used and perceived. Package repos are infrastructure, and reliability is important. A server behind someone's TV is much more susceptible to power outages, network issues, accidents, and tampering. Again, I don't know that's the case since they didn't really say anything specific. > not hosted in just any data center where commodity…

The F-Droid repos are provided by redundant mirrors: https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Running_a_Mirror/

If this is the hidden master server that only the mirrors talk to, then it's redundancy is largely irrelevant. Yes, if it's down, new packages can't be uploaded, but that doesn't affect downloads at all. We also know nothing about the backup setup they have.

A lot depends on the threat model they're operating under. If state-level actors and supply chain attacks are the primary threats, they may be better off having their system under the control of a few trusted contributors versus a large corporation that they have little to no influence over.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#112

Post by lucb1e »

charcircuit wrote: post #100
anticorporate wrote: post #46

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.

F Droid is no where near being a critical project holding Android up. The Play Store, and the Play Services themselves are much more critical. Being open source doesn't make you immune from criticism for not following industry standards or being called out for poor security.

If you have nothing to install on your device, what's the point of being able to? For me, f-droid is a cornerstone in the android ecosystem. I could source apks elsewhere but it would be much more of a hassle and not necessarily have automatic updates. iOS would become a lot more attractive to me if Android didn't have the ecosystem that's centered around the open apps that you can find on f-droid

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#113

Post by shrubble »

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.

A full rack, 10 gigabits bandwidth and 1920W of power is available for as little as $800/month: https://1530swift.com/colocation.php

Of course you have to buy the switches and servers…

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#114

Post by lytedev »

eulgro wrote: post #91
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…

It's just a build server no? If that's the case it's not the end of the world. Or does it also serve the APKs?

depending on how you view it, the build server _does_ serve the APKs, right?

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#115

Post by silisili »

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.

For reference, in the US at least, there was/is a company called Joes Data Center in KC who would colo a 1U for $30 or $40 a month. I'd used them for years before not needing it anymore, so not some fly by night company(despite the name).

At that rate, that would buy you nearly 1000 years of hosting.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#116

Post by wtallis »

petcat wrote: post #109
briffle wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OSU Open Source Lab gives machines to groups in their datacenter: https://osuosl.org/services/hosting/ It has hosted quite a few famous services.

Which famous services? I doubt OSU is going to host F-Droid. It doesn't even sound like F-Droid would want them to host it.

https://osuosl.org/blog/osl-moving-to-state-data-center/ mentions several major, famous services/projects that OSUOSL either has hosted in the past or is still hosting: kernel.org, Debian, Gentoo, Drupal, OpenWRT, OSGEO. https://osuosl.org/blog/osl-future/ also mentions hosting Mozilla at the time of the Firefox 1.0 release, and having previously hosted Apache Software Foundation. Closer in relevance to F-Droid, OSUOSL hosts the GitLab instance used by postmarketOS: https://postmarketos.org/blog/2024/10/14/gitlab-migration/

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#117

Post by drnick1 »

kube-system wrote: post #90
lrvick wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which one of those things do you think you can't get in a datacenter?

That's not the point. The point is that a "home" setup can basically replicate or exceed a "professional" setup when done right.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#120

Post by Aurornis »

silisili wrote: post #115
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.

For reference, in the US at least, there was/is a company called Joes Data Center in KC who would colo a 1U for $30 or $40 a month. I'd used them for years before not needing it anymore, so not some fly by night company(despite the name). At that rate, that would buy you nearly 1000 years of hosting.

I was trying to avoid naming exact prices because it becomes argument fodder, but locally I can get good quality colo for $50/month and excellent quality coloration with high bandwidth and good interconnects for under $100 for 1U

I really don’t know where the commenter above was getting the idea that $400K wouldn’t last very long

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