7 ms·
Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost
- electricant 2y agoNot only alpine linux but also X.Org and freedesktop.org
- Shakahs 2y agoPer 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. > https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freedesktop/freedesktop/-/issues/2011 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freedesktop/freedesktop/-/iss...
- Xunjin 2y agoGreat point, Hetzner has a great price, or even discuss with them a sponsorship too?
- weinzierl 2y agoHetzner has a great price but it plays not in the same league as AWS. It's cheap and good enough for some applications but I wouldn't call Hetzner a professional service.
- preisschild 2y agoHetzner Cloud is definitely professional enough to place most production systems on it. Sure, servers might die at times, but this also happens at AWS and can be avoided by using multiple servers in a HA configuration.
- weinzierl 2y agoAre you running a production system on it? One that makes money and loses money when down?
- bayindirh 2y agoDo you? Everybody I know is happy with what Hetzner provides, even at production level. OTOH, "arguably better" DigitalOcean sent me a "Your physical host died, so we restarted it. If it persists, we'll migrate" e-mail, which just shows the reality of the hardware. On your question, while I do not have services on Hetzner yet, I manage a lot of servers, so I know dynamics of a datacenter and what it entails to keep one up.
- weinzierl 2y agoI had enough trouble with them that I don't even consider.
- bayindirh 2y agoSuch as? If you prefer, of course.
- weinzierl 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41360708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41360708
- arghwhat 2y agoYou're linking this everywhere, but it has absolutely zero relevance. Your beef is not with Hetzner, but whoever decided to run the service. Unless the customer violates local legislation or the hosting providers ToS, the appropriate action is to leave the service running, be it AWS, GCP or Hetzner. I would quite frankly have been very disappointed with them if they had done anything in response to you request.
- throw3748859 2y agoHetzner is hosted in Germany. AWS is controlled by US company. US sanction laws are legal nightmare, quicksand that constantly changes. Major global infrastructure projects like Freedesktop should avoid US!
- voxic11 2y agoSoftware In The Public Interest Inc. (creators of free desktop) is incorporated in New York so they have to follow US sanction law anyways.
- Xunjin 2y agoMaybe it's time to consider changing it to another country which is actually OSS friendly and doesn't change all the time their politics. PS: Sorry for the off-topic discussion.
- rwmj 2y agoRISC-V International moved from California (IIRC?) to Switzerland for basically this reason.
- freedomben 2y agoIt's shocking and saddening to think one might need to change from the United States to some other country in order to seek freedom. But here we are
- rangerelf 2y agoThe USA being "Free" has mostly been a myth. It's "Free" if you're a member of the owner class, else you're freedom is subject to the whims of politicians and the wealthy. Aristocracy, really.
- freedomben 2y ago
- Xunjin 2y agoSorry, but could you point out what is not professional? Not everyone needs a UI wrapper that offers tons of OSS services with high prices.
- weinzierl 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41360708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41360708
- IntelMiner 2y agoHow is this Hetzner's fault (or concern?) "Hey your customer is hosting a website with random pictures on it. One of them of me is unflattering. Please make them fix it"
- weinzierl 2y agoThey were hosting a StackOverflow copy, which is OK because of Creative Commons. All my answers were still under my name as it should be. The only difference to the original was my profile picture, which was an explicit porn image. For several weeks everyone searching for my name or my StackOverflow answers saw that. I'm glad that I was not looking for a job at the time. I exhausted all possibilities on all channels to rectify this situation short of using a lawyer. I put a lot of effort into getting things in order and seriously considered going the legal route but ultimately decided against it mainly because courts are hit and miss here when it comes to reputation damage of regular individuals as opposed to companies or celebrities. EDIT: I should have answered your question how this is Hetzner's fault more directly. The website they were hosting did not have the (in Germany) mandatory legal notice (Impressum) or any contact details. This shifts the responsibility to the provider (Providerhaftung). Also I would like to note that I did neither request them to give me their customer's details nor to shut down the site. All I wanted was them to work with their customer to have the offending image removed. Also I am convinced the porn image was not malice but an accident. The scraper replaced all profile images with ones they probably scraped from a forum. I was just unlucky to get a very indecent one. Had Hetzner collaborated I'm pretty sure this could have been resolved in no time.
- rglullis 2y agoI saw their original announcement and they said that their infra (3 AMD EPYC from generations ago, 3 Intel servers from 2 generations ago, 2 80-core ARM servers) would cost $24k/month at Equinix prices. I checked Hetzner's equivalent offerings, it would be ~$1.5k/month for newer AMD servers. It would probably be even less if they went with older servers listed at their auction. And it probably would be even less if they just moved their CI runners to virtual servers on Hetzner's cloud. Seriously, Hetzner provides so much move value per dollar, sometimes I fear that one day they will find out and just jack up the prices to match the rest.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hirako2000 2y agoVPS business is very different than the "cloud" space. Yes yes there are cloud features now offered by VPS providers, but they are add ons to chase demand, they aren't positioning their offering to appeal to users wanting a comprehensive suite of services on the platform. Managed databases, SMTP as a service, deployment as a service etc etc etc. For that reasons market rates are different. For Hetzner to bump their prices significantly they would need to build a cloud platform a la AWS/GCP/Azure. Won't happen by Xmas even if went all in. They are good at what they do and make money so they stick to that.
- rglullis 2y agoOf course they are not in the hyperscaler space, but they are far from being "just" a VPS provider. Their cloud always had on-demand, per-hour billing of servers and block storage volumes, all very easy to manage and provision via their API. Recently they got into object storage space. They even provide a switch to connect their cloud servers with a dedicated one, so you can have, e.g, a beefy GPU server running a LLM model and your web service auto running on the cheap. I believe that the only thing that really holds Hetzner at their price levels is that the price-sensitive people can always threaten to move to OVH.
- 2y ago
- mysteria 2y agoHetzner also has the interesting choice of consumer-grade machines which probably work fine in cases where you are constrained by CPU power rather than memory capacity/bandwidth. You'll also lose a bit of redundancy and reliability but that might not be as big of a deal since the machines are managed by them and you can probably get things replaced quickly. For example depending on the workload the CCX43s might be replaceable by the AX52. Meanwhile for CI runners you probably could split the big bare metal servers down into smaller individual machines and run less jobs of them. Depending on the CI load profile it might also make even more sense to scale out to the cloud on high demand as opposed to having a bunch of mostly idle machines.
- mrbluecoat 2y agoAwesome projects and I hope they find a new home soon! For those wanting to donate: Alpine Linux: https://opencollective.com/alpinelinux https://opencollective.com/alpinelinux Freedesktop [edit]: ..no crowdsource option at the moment
- pabs3 2y agoThe second one is only for fprint, a tool for supporting fingerprint scanners (for eg laptop ones) on Linux.
- systems_glitch 2y agoOh 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.
- plagiarist 2y agoIt's surprising to me that Alpine isn't set for life from corporate donations. They're my first choice for laying down the foundation in a container.
- rollcat 2y agoThis is why: https://m.xkcd.com/2347/ https://m.xkcd.com/2347/ Now go ask your employer to donate.
- klardotsh 2y agoAside from some major examples, like most of the big tech companies funding the Linux kernel and maybe the Rust and/or Python Foundations in decent numbers, for the most part, corporations don't pay for open-source. That's why they love it so much: it costs ~$0, but generates immense business value for them (in that they don't have to write, debug, or maintain any of that, often essential, code or infra). I can think of maybe three exceptions my entire career, and none of them were especially huge contributions.
- systems_glitch 2y agoIndeed, we donate to several open source projects on which we depend, but we're also a small two-person operation. No medium/large company I've worked for ever donated monetarily to open source projects, though one did encourage us to fix bugs and submit patches/pull request, which is at least something! Slackware's the same way, most donations come from individuals and very small companies.
- libertarian1 2y ago[dead]
- jmclnx 2y agoRHEL (IBM) is doing well, why can't they provide free hosting and at the same time show off their cloud products ? RHEL benefits from freedesktop and X, and as a show of good faith they could support Alpine too. But as we all know, RHEL/IBM only wants to take free labor and not really give back these days :(
- Sammi 2y agoRedhat, Canonical, IBM, Oracle, Google, hell even Microsoft... There are a bunch of big actors in the Linux space that could and probably should be financing this. Also there's the Linux Foundation that is made for financing Linux projects.
- Sphax 2y agoAren't they (Red Hat) one of the biggest contributor to Wayland ?
- martinsnow 2y agoRed hat contribute a lot but they don't pay well. I believe their finances are tight.
- CursedSilicon 2y agoRed Hat's gambit has always been to hire engineers to do good work on Linux broadly, in many areas. As opposed to just dropping crates full of money at random on projects Of course they still get tarred and feathered with the "Red Hat wants to control Linux!" brush because they...contribute the bulk of development to projects like GNOME
- martinsnow 2y agoI've nothing against red hat and i love that an organization is doing work in the free software space. But it's a choice as an engineer if you want to devote your loss of salary to do honest work. I do open source in my free time because my family can't sustain itself otherwise. Kudos to all the devs out there working on open software.
- mobilio 2y agoIt looks as a job for Cloudflare: https://cloudflaremirrors.com/ https://cloudflaremirrors.com/ But i don't know who is responsible for that.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rollcat 2y agoWhile I have mixed feelings about Cloudflare, I don't see why you have been downvoted. This is on topic for the discussion, already implemented for a couple distros, etc. The question of "who is responsible": anyone is free to run their own mirror, after all this software is freely redistributable. As for "why not", if I were to lead a project like Alpine, I would insist that the org stays in control of its own infrastructure. Mirrors are also only one chunk of the problem; you also need builder machines.
- bananapub 2y ago> I don't see why you have been downvoted. presumably because it's a silly idea, given Cloudflare isn't a colo or dedicated server company and they won't let you just rack machines in their DCs for the same reason Google won't.
- jtrn 2y agoI 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?
- gosub100 2y agoI think it's the same reason PGP never caught on. The learning curve is just too steep. There are 3 major concepts: understanding how to run the comnand, understanding the idea of public key crypto, and actually using it (i.e. NOT imaging the ISO unless the signature passes). What it needs is something like a torrent client that 1) doesn't let you download unless you supply the expected SHA first, and perhaps 2) that it verifies that the hash came from the signed webpage where you got the torrent link. Too many people (myself included) think it's not going to happen to them (download a backdoored program/OS). After 20 years in the industry I'm just now learning how certificates work and how to work with them.
- rollcat 2y ago> I think it's the same reason PGP never caught on. The learning curve is just too steep. This is what I always emphasise: usability first. If a solution is secure on paper, but confusing to use, then it's not secure - the user can get confused and do the wrong thing. Defaults matter. > What it needs is something like a torrent client that 1) doesn't let you download unless you supply the expected SHA first, and perhaps 2) that it verifies that the hash came from the signed webpage where you got the torrent link. This is already a solved problem. Just provide a magnet link. You already have to trust the website to provide the checksum, so why not trust the link? As for packages, Debian experimented with a BitTorrent transport for apt a long while ago, but I suppose it didn't catch on. Perhaps this was before BitTorrent had HTTP fallback? Either way, this would be an interesting avenue for research.
- 565j56j 2y agoThe learning curve myth needs to die. It can be solved with good UX but there is no real profit in that so you will never see any company dedicate marketing dollars towards it. So truly decentralized and distributed technologies die because no one wants to spend money to market them for free.
- zx2c4 2y agoThe 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!
- rudasn 2y agoHey! Just wanted to say thank you for wireguard :) Hope you find a host soon!
- bestham 2y agoI guess Tailscale or Mullvad should consider hosting you.
- likeabatterycar 2y agoWhat prevents Wireguard from moving to GitHub or why is bare metal hosting needed? The code is small and integrated into the kernel at this point. Aren't your needs primarily for distributing Windows/Mac packages at this point?
- zx2c4 2y agoNo, it's considerably more involved than that. For example, there's extensive CI: https://www.wireguard.com/build-status/ https://www.wireguard.com/build-status/ This thing builds a fresh kernel and boots it for every commit for a bunch of systems. And there's also a lot of long running fuzzing and SAT solving and all sorts of other heavy computation happening during different aspects of development. Development is a bit more than just pushing some code up to Github and hoping for the best.
- likeabatterycar 2y agoThanks for the explanation, I had been under the impression that Wireguard was "done" at this point.
- briffle 2y agohave you looked into Oregon State University's Open Source Lab? https://osuosl.org/communities/ https://osuosl.org/communities/ They host quite a few open source projects there. And seem to be one of the few that also hosts for ARM and POWERPC projects.
- voxadam 2y agoOregon State University's Open Source Lab (https://osuosl.org/ https://osuosl.org/) 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.
- stonogo 2y agoThis has been brought up with freedesktop and they handwaved it away. They claim they want to DIY with donation money but they don't have a donation mechanism and I suspect they don't know how much work just handling money is.
- voxadam 2y agoThey offer colocation as well. https://osuosl.org/services/hosting/details/ https://osuosl.org/services/hosting/details/
- jorams 2y ago> This has been brought up with freedesktop and they handwaved it away. They claim they want to DIY with donation money You are making all of this sound way more definitive than the ticket. The donation money approach is the personal opinion of the sysadmin. The OSUOSL is brought up, some explanations are added that make it more attractive and remove some doubts, and beyond that it's waiting for the board to decide what's next.
- loganmarchione 2y agoSo 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?
- acatton 2y agoHow are VMs solving this issue? You cannot just snapshot them and migrate them to another provider. You'll get different local-IPv4 and different IPv6, etc.
- indigodaddy 2y agoSo what, they didn't BYOIPs with equinix did they? It's trivial to update IPs in a migrated VM image
- johnklos 2y agoVMs introduce security issues that bare metal don't have. Those security issues are mostly academic for most people and many projects, but not for software where a supply chain compromise could severely impact all users of that software. Imagine if Wireguard were backdoored because someone working for the ISP that runs the VMs compromised their VMs through the hypervisor. How would a project audit an ISP? How could anything be trusted? Bottom line: it can't. ISPs don't give that kind of information to customers unless you're special (government, spend crazy money). While it's still possible to compromise a machine through physical access, it's MUCH more difficult. How do you bring it in to single user mode to introduce a privileged user without people noticing that it's down, even momentarily, or that the uptime is now zero? Compromise like this is possible, but worlds more difficult to pull off than compromise through hypervisor.
- thatSteveFan 2y agoPossible I'm just not remembering the history right, but I think this is from when "Equinix metal" was packet.com. I think this is a handshake deal they had from before they were bought, and it's going away as packet.com becomes more integrated into Equinix.
- johnklos 2y agoIs 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? 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.
- mauricio 2y agoDid you read the article? There are large storage and bandwidth requirements.
- johnklos 2y agoYes, I did, of course. Storage is MUCH cheaper when you colo, and bandwidth requirements are a large part of why you colocate instead of just running servers out of an office building that has at least two upstream connections. I'm really curious what you think they're using now. Certainly you read the article... It says they're using bare metal servers. That's basically colo where the provider owns, but doesn't control, the hardware.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- timewizard 2y ago> Storage is MUCH cheaper Probably because it's not redundant or automatically backed up at any interval. The worst days of my life have been during hardware failures at colos.
- stonogo 2y agoYou are aware that backups and redundant storage existed before the cloud, right?
- 2y ago
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y agoWhy is this stuff not primarily hosted via bittorrent, now? Even Microsoft updates can use end user device distributed hosting.
- mrweasel 2y agoHow do you host bug trackers, git repos, CI runners or mailinglists on Bittorrent? Admittedly I am rather surprised by the storage requirements from Freedesktop.
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y agoYou could host all of that on a single small VM or physical server.
- justinclift 2y agoNot their GitLab setup. GitLab is a resource hog, and from what I understand their setup is fairly well used.
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y agoI run a gitlab setup for an decent sized enterprise and it only needs 2 VMs hosted locally. Small by on premise enterprise standards is 4-16 cores and 128GB of RAM. Our big VMs have 64 cores and 1TB of RAM (db servers).
- dehrmann 2y agoBroader 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.
- stonogo 2y agoThe MBAs took over. Public service doesn't "generate renevue."
- fph 2y agoFWIW in Italy we still have [GARR Mirror](https://mirror.garr.it/index_en.html https://mirror.garr.it/index_en.html). It includes Alpine Linux.
- Arnavion 2y agoMaybe not every university, but plenty of distro mirrors are still hosted by universities, both in the US and internationally. Another example is Oregon State University mentioned elsewhere in this thread that still provides hosting + CI services; eg postmarketOS recently moved from gitlab.com to a self-hosted GitLab on OSU-provided and -hosted hardware.
- DaSHacka 2y agoMost mirrors are run by clubs at universities, typically LUGs or similar. I'm not sure how many mirrors are run by the university directly, though AFAIK MIT and RIT host theirs directly.
- 1970-01-01 2y ago>Both services have largely depended on free server resources ... 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? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
- kazen44 2y agoso, the linux foundation (or torvalds himself, whatever) should run a entire datacenter right now? You know running an anctual datacenter with all its cooling ,storage, networking and power requirements is a full time job for several people right? Why not put bare metal in someplace which already does that for far cheaper and better?
- 1970-01-01 2y agoSaying it's far cheaper without actual numbers is not saying anything. 10 years in a DC is 14% cheaper than going in with a provider. This donation money can simply be better spent if long term goals are considered.
- supriyo-biswas 2y agoIsn’t fly.io all hosted on Equinix Metal too? Or are they using their collocation services?
- reincoder 2y agoWhen 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: https://almalinux.org/blog/2024-08-07-mirrors-1-to-400/ https://almalinux.org/blog/2024-08-07-mirrors-1-to-400/ 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. We could provide IP location data sponsorship to popular distro mirror systems, which would make traffic routing and load distributions more effective.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoOld-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.
- HackerThemAll 2y agoAll the big cloud behemoths benefit A LOT from Alpine. And helping Alpine would be pennies for them.