Per the ongoing Freedesktop discussion, AWS offered to host but Freedesktop is leaning towards self-hosting on Hetzner so they can control their own destiny and sponsors can contribute cash towards the bill instead of donating hardware.<p>> <a href="https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freedesktop/freedesktop/-/issues/2011" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freedesktop/freedesktop/-/iss...</a>
The WireGuard project is also in the same situation, due to Equinix Metal shutting down. If anybody would like to host us, please reach out to team at wireguard dot com. Thanks!
Oregon State University's Open Source Lab (<a href="https://osuosl.org/" rel="nofollow">https://osuosl.org/</a>) offers managed and unmanaged hosting to open source projects. They even have IBM Z and POWER10 hosting if you're into that sort of thing.
Is colocation knowledge lost now? Do people no longer know how to configure a server or three, bring them to colo and run them? I don't understand how this is a story worthy of an Ars Technica article. Where's the issue?<p>If the issue is cost, slightly older Epyc hardware is quite affordable, and colo deals can be found for extremely reasonable costs. If it's expertise, then all they have to do is ask.
RHEL (IBM) is doing well, why can't they provide free hosting and at the same time show off their cloud products ?<p>RHEL benefits from freedesktop and X, and as a show of good faith they could support Alpine too.<p>But as we all know, RHEL/IBM only wants to take free labor and not really give back these days :(
Awesome projects and I hope they find a new home soon! For those wanting to donate:<p>Alpine Linux: <a href="https://opencollective.com/alpinelinux" rel="nofollow">https://opencollective.com/alpinelinux</a><p>Freedesktop [edit]: ..no crowdsource option at the moment
Oh man that sucks! I wonder if we could pull Alpine into our colo, we recently upgraded to a full rack from 2U (it was cheaper than a quarter rack!) and have a ton of space. Plus all of our libvirt/KVM HVMs run Alpine.
Broader question, but whatever happened to every university with a CS department hosting mirrors of popular distros? I always assumed CDNs replaced them, but seeing this, maybe they didn't.
I haven't looked into it, so there might be a good reason, but why isn't peer-to-peer technology utilized more and more for stuff like this? I had hoped that BitTorrent would have made these things a solved problem. I looked into Storj earlier, but it seemed too controlled/unpredictable/centralized. Anybody have some good insights into this?
When it comes to mirror sponsorships, we (IPinfo) offer IP location data sponsorship. We spoke with Alma Linux and they used our IP location data to route traffic for their mirror system: <a href="https://almalinux.org/blog/2024-08-07-mirrors-1-to-400/" rel="nofollow">https://almalinux.org/blog/2024-08-07-mirrors-1-to-400/</a><p>At the moment, we operate 900 servers. We evaluated the idea of hosting mirrors on some of our servers, but our servers are not super powerful, and we have to pay for bandwidth. We use these servers in our production pipeline. Maintenance alone is a massive task, and hosting distro mirrors could be incredibly challenging. We are not at that scale yet.<p>We could provide IP location data sponsorship to popular distro mirror systems, which would make traffic routing and load distributions more effective.
It looks as a job for Cloudflare:
<a href="https://cloudflaremirrors.com/" rel="nofollow">https://cloudflaremirrors.com/</a><p>But i don't know who is responsible for that.
>Both services have largely depended on free server resources ...<p>Running on 'large donations' is not a viable strategy for any long-term goal. Perhaps its time for Linux to consider running a tiny datacenter of its very own to both dog-feed itself and give itself extra momentum or inertia from donation stall-out?<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food</a>
So far, the Equinix Metal shutdown affects Freedesktop, Alpine, WireGuard, and Flathub. Why can't these organizations use VMs? Is there something special about bare-metal services, or has Equinix not offered their VM service to these organizations?
Old-school open source projects got hosting from hundreds of mirrors, mostly universities and ISPs, and some businesses. If you have lots of mirrors you don't need as much traffic per host.