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A faster heart for F-Droid

f-droid.org

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Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#171

Post by lrvick »

arjie wrote: post #153
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.

I, personally, have a cabinet in a colo. With $400k, I can host it at that datacentre with the income from risk-free return never exercising the capital with 10 GigE, 3 kW of power. If I can do it, they can do it. Modern computers are super efficient. A 9755 has 128 cores and you can get it for cheap. If you've been doing this for a while you'd have gotten the RAM for cheap too. If I, a normie, can have terabytes of…

I to am in the bay area, and clearly I have been shopping at the wrong colos. I expected to find nothing with unlimited bandwidth for under $1k/mo given past experience with what may have been higher end DCs.

In any event if I was the volunteer sysadmin that had to babysit the box, I would rather have it at my home with business fiber where I am on premises most of the time because getting in and out of a colo is always a whole thing if their security is worth a damn.

Even given a frugal and accessible setup like that I can imagine 400k lasting 5 years tops especially if paying for the volunteers business fiber and much more especially given I expect some of it is to provide a sustainable compensation to key team members as well. Every cent will count.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#173

Post by u8080 »

Aurornis wrote: post #39
a3w wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the thread model, which one is worse. State actor? Gets into data centre, or has to break into a privately owned apartment. Criminal/3rd party state intelligence service? Could get into both, at a risk or with blackmail, threats, or violence. Dumb accidents? Well, all buildings can burn or have an power outage.

> State actor? Gets into data centre, or has to break into a privately owned apartment. I don’t think a state actor would actually break in to either in this case, but if they did then breaking into the private apartment would be a dream come true. Breaking into a data center requires coordination and ensuring a lot of people with access and visibility stay quiet. Breaking into someone’s apartment means waiting until…

>I don’t think a state actor would actually break in to either in this case

Read Jabber.ru Hetzner accident: https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#174

Post by gnufx »

wtallis wrote: post #152
gnufx wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> commodity hardware Apart from the "someone's basement", as objected to in this thread, it also doesn't say they acquired "commodity hardware"; I took it to suggest the opposite, presumably for good reason.

> it also doesn't say they acquired "commodity hardware"; I took it to suggest the opposite, presumably for good reason. This seems entirely like wishful thinking. They were using a 12 year old server that was increasingly unfit for the day-to-day task of building Android applications. It doesn't seem like they were in a position to acquire and deploy any exotic hardware (except to the extent that really old hardware…

I'm just reading what was written, especially "the specific components we needed", and assuming they're not as incompetent as is being suggested, given they've served me well. Perhaps you haven't been tendering for server hardware recently, even bog-standard stuff, and seen the responses that even say they can't quote a fixed price currently. At least, that's in my part of the world, in an operation buying a good deal of hardware. We also have systems over ten years old running.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#175

Post by ycombinatrix »

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…

Is colocation not considered to be "self-hosting" in the cloud era?

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#176

Post by throwaway2037 »

dotancohen wrote: post #49
pilif wrote: 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.

Stupid question from me: What are their other costs? I'm a total newbie about data center colo setups, but as I understand, it includes: power and internet access with ingress and egress. Are you thinking their egress will be very high, thus thus need to pay additional bandwidth charges?

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#177

Post by wongarsu »

quantummagic wrote: post #107
pydry wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame mozilla wont step up to fund it. They've spunked way more money on way dumber things.

Imagine the good they could do if they didn't pay their CEO 6 million a year.

They'd probably burn it without much to show for, like the rest of their funds

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#178

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#179

Post by throwaway2037 »

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.

Those prices are rock bottom! For that price, what do you get for (a) power budget, (b) Internet connectivity, (c) ingress and egress per month?

I Googled for that brand and got a few hits:

    - https://inflect.com/building/1325-tracy-avenue-kansas-city/joes-datacenter/datacenter/joes-datacenter
    - https://www.linkedin.com/company/joesdatacenter/
    - https://www.facebook.com/joesdatacenter/
The homepage now redirects here: https://patmos.tech/

Another under appreciated point about that data center: It has excellent geographical location to cover North America.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#180

Post by Xunjin »

user205738 wrote: post #172

Disappointed in HN because of these comments

Criticism is good when it comes with feasible suggestions or even a little help.

I wonder how many of HN audience does know someone, or a guy who knows a guy, which works in a data center able to manage the hardware and a simple email/message/hello there could open a new opportunity.

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