211–220 of 231 posts
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So that they can pay 100x more expenses for.. no gain? They would pay an arm just for traffic.
It's OpEx. MBAs will pour unlimited money into OpEx to avoid CapEx.
> 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?
I think there are quite some misconceptions about F-Droid in the comments : - you can be your own F-Droid server In fact it's a basic static HTTP(S) server that is generated with the list of .apk and meta-data so it rely doesn't require much. I think what is concerning to people is that the most popular INSTANCE of F-Droid, the one that is by default when one downloads the F-Droid CLIENT, is "centralized" but again t…
"It's only popular, it's not really central to F-Droid itself." I've used F-Droid for years and I've never used the client ("the F-Droid app") For me the value of F-Droid is as a list of open-source software with (a) pointers to source code and (b) sample binaries The goal of F-Droid could be to enable Android users to read, edit and compile the software they choose to run on their "phones" But F-Droid promotes their…
Is popularity, e.g., user majorities versus user minorities, always equivalent to "importance". For web traffic and associated data collection, ad services, etc., popularity is obviously important. But what if one is not focused on such things
Consider the statement "It's only popular, it's not really central for F-Droid itself"
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A home setup might be able to rival or beat an “edge” enterprise network closet. It’s not going to even remotely rival a tier 3/4 data center in any way. The physical security, infrastructure, and connectivity will never come close. E.g. nobody is doing full 2N electrical and environmental in their homelab. And they certainly aren’t building attack resistant perimeter fences and gates around their homes, unless they’…
> The physical security, infrastructure, and connectivity will never come close. E.g. nobody is doing full 2N electrical and environmental in their homelab. And they certainly aren’t building attack resistant perimeter fences and gates around their homes, unless they’re home labbing on a compound in a war torn country. Why would you need all of that if what they have works? Nobody is going to raid a repo of open sour…
But the assertion by commenters above that home-hosting is a viable or even a better option for a project like this is silly. Colocating a single server is cheaper than a single a Comcast Business internet connection. Air conditioners fail. Electrical failures happen. These things might not be a problem for a personal project, but they're easily and cheaply mitigable risks at commercial scale.
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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…
The build server going down means that no one's app can be updated, even for critical security updates.
For something that important, they should aspire to 99.999% ("five nines of") reliability. With a single physical server, achieving five nines over a long period of time usually means that you were both lucky (no hardware failures other than redundant storage) and probably irresponsible (applied kernel updates infrequently - even if only on the hypervisor level).
Now... 2 servers in 2 different basements? That could achieve five nines ;)
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"F-Droid is not hosted in a data centre with proper procedures, access controls, and people whose jobs are on the line. Instead it's in some guy's bedroom." Not reassuring.
It could just be a colo, there are still plenty of data centres around the globe that will sell you a space in a shared rack with a certain power density per U of space. The list of people who can access that shared locked rack is likely a known quantity with most such organisations and I know in the past we had some details of the people who were responsible for it
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Love finding other metro area folks on hn!
I'm actually Canadian, not a metro area person, just a happy customer
So glad it grew into what it is now!