Inside Oregon State University's Open Source Lab 55
In his main page debut, ramereth writes with a look at the infrastructure of OSUOSL from Linux.com. From the article: "Many people use Linux in many ways, often totally unaware that they're depending on Linux. Likewise, those of us in the open source community depend heavily on Oregon State University's Open Source Labs (OSUOSL), but may not even realize just how much. Thanks to one of the final talks at LinuxCon by Lance Albertson, it's much clearer now just how important OSUOSL is."
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For those wondering about the comment above, the OUS mascot is the bever.
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Finally a university that admits what campus life really is about.
perhaps not the most neutral source (Score:1)
It may well be a very important lab, but this piece reads a bit like fluff. The fact that one of the lab's members gave a talk saying it's important isn't the world's most neutral assessment of its importance; that is pretty much what people do when representing their labs at conferences.
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If it's any comfort, it's not different in statistics. One of the most often heard excuses when delivering a horribly botched paper is "I thought that's what you wanted to hear". And while they surely will have a great future in the reality of statistics in various companies that fudge them (there's very little truth left in statistics, far too much money involved in it), like your people will have a great future in PR, it's NOT what you want in an academic environment.
Well, not what you should want, please
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The fact that one of the lab's members gave a talk saying it's important isn't the world's most neutral assessment of its importance
Yeah, you need a 2000 year old book to add weight to those sorts of tactics..... ;)
Huskies Rule! (Score:1)
Quack like the open source ducks you are, Oregon! ;->~
Seriously, though, the best part of Open Source is they go away with treatment, and an internal solution of Bheer.
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Drowning in US beer? That's violates your eight amendment!
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Wrong university. OSU is beavers, not ducks (Ducks are UO).
That said, OSUOSL does provide mirrors for a lot of the distros I've downloaded. They apparently host a lot of other stuff for open source projects too.
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Spoken like someone who never attended UW.
I'm a grad. 92.
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Then please, at least learn the other schools in your conference before you talk shit. You look like an idiot, when it's the Ducks that are supposed to look like idiots!
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The "whoosh" of the original comment going over your head was audible over a thousand miles away. He intentionally confused the mascots of OSU and UO, in order to antagonize the OSU fans (and probably the UO fans as a side benefit).
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I've never been to a UW football game, but I've been to championship winning crew and soccer competitions. In Seattle, soccer is more popular than old fogie football. We're a feeder college internationally for soccer players.
Wake up, it's a new century.
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Quack like the open source ducks you are, Oregon! ;->~
Umm. Wrong school. OSU Beavers [wikipedia.org], not those silly Ducks down the valley. :-)
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Re:Huskies Rule! or the tale of Ducks and Beavers (Score:1)
Mostly follow the away soccer and crew games, actually.
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I see what you did there. :3
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oh, OSU, they're ok.
actually, we collaborate with them on a lot of research projects.
Duck!
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Just like a UW fan, they don't even know which other Pac-12 school to hate on.
Here's a hint. OSU = Beavers. UO = Ducks.*
*unless talking about the Ohio State Buckeyes and the University of Oklahoma Sooners.
So... hosting? (Score:1)
If I understand that article right, the lab provides hosting to medium-large OSS projects. Is that right? The summary makes it sound like the OSUOSL contributed some often-used libraries or tools, but it just sounds like they leveraged their University bandwidth to feed a server farm. I don't consider that so very impressive.
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Kernel.org and several other sites are hosted here. They do not use the university's bandwith, they have their own connections. Google gave them some funding a few years ago, along with several other companies to help pay for bandwith.
In fact, you can see their bandwith graphs here: from their provider, nero.net, which conglomerates many state of Oregon groups and buys bandwith (similar to badger.NET in wisconsin)
http://netfoo.nero.net/netviewer?meta=partner&locale=OSUOSL [nero.net]
(keep in mind, they have a mir
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(keep in mind, they have a mirror in the midwest provided by (I think) TDS)
That is correct. We have two FTP mirrors hosted by TDS (Chicago and New York) in addition to the systems we have on campus in Crovallis.
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(keep in mind, they have a mirror in the midwest provided by (I think) TDS)
That is correct. We have two FTP mirrors hosted by TDS (Chicago and New York) in addition to the systems we have on campus in Crovallis.
You can see their bandwidth utilization here: http://ftpmap.osuosl.org/ [osuosl.org]
Keep in mind that the Corvallis server is out of rotation currently because of some hardware issues.
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We employ roughly as many programmers as sysadmins, and write plenty of code. http://code.osuosl.org/ [osuosl.org]
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https://github.com/MostAwesomeDude [github.com]
https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/MostAwesomeDude [ohloh.net]
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~csimpson/ [freedesktop.org]
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/csimpson/linux-2.6.git;a=summary [kernel.org]
Your turn. Put up or shut up. >:3
"much clearer now just how important OSUOSL is" (Score:2)
You can learn how to do what they do, in your basement, it'll just be somewhat smaller and slower, by at worst only by about two orders of magnitude. In fact my basement is considerably more technologically advanced than their datacenter. In fact, a recent string of emails on the NANOG mailing list about basement labs indicates my basement is relatively crude and simplistic.
Compare and contrast w/ my house
2770 square foot data center with 76 racks
About the same floor size, although they're about seventy racks ahead of me. I had three at one poin
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I am not a full-timer, and I am not speaking on behalf of OSL.
The "legal reasons" alluded to are mostly problems with other signers on the contract for our upstream bandwidth provider. *coughDuckscough* At our bandwidth scale, tunneling is not feasible.
We don't run Puppet at the moment, we run CFEngine. Everybody's receiving Puppet training and there's a slow-yet-steady migration to Puppet, but these things take time. There are quite a few people depending on us to not fuck up, so we don't change our stacks
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Also you guys are majorly dragging your feet on the Puppet thing. UO has been on it for about three years, and it is leaps and bounds better than CFEngine. It doesn't seem to help that a large portion of your staff are students with little background in system administration - not only do you have to teach them the tools, you also have to teach them the practice.
Oh I agree. Its been quite frustrating not getting very far on our puppet migration. And it has been difficult to manage considering most of our help is from students whom we have to teach/mentor at the same time. I wish we could hire more full-time sysadmins but we simply don't have the money so we have to make due with what we have.
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The "legal reasons" alluded to are mostly problems with other signers on the contract for our upstream bandwidth provider. *coughDuckscough* At our bandwidth scale, tunneling is not feasible.
Indeed, tunneling IPv6 at our scale would be quite silly.
We don't run Puppet at the moment, we run CFEngine. Everybody's receiving Puppet training and there's a slow-yet-steady migration to Puppet, but these things take time. There are quite a few people depending on us to not fuck up, so we don't change our stacks without deliberation and testing.
We've been using CFengine since nearly the day we started so we have a collection of CFengine recipes that go back 5-6 years. Its going to take a while to get everything in a state considering there's only one full-timer (me) and 4-6 undergraduate students. Granted we're working on just getting a bootstrap set of modules done first (which is almost completed). Additionally we're writing our modules so that they are reusable (which takes more time) for
Everyone has Linux in the home. (Score:2)
Your DVD player, your Flat Panel TV, your BluRay player, your Mp3 player stereo, your router, even some kids toys run Linux.
It's everywhere because Windows cant be and has a gigantic cost compared to using linux in the product.
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From Apache to just about every Linux distro you've ever heard of, they run a mirror for it.
I max out my considerable downstream connection from them frequently. These are cool people doing a pretty cool thing.
What's funny is we sometimes get abuse emails from ISP's complaining that we are DOS'ing them when in fact its their users just using our mirrors.
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I really did expect to see mention of CSOS in Lance's slides, but I digress.
That predates me by quite a bit and had never heard that story before. I'm surprised John Sechrest never told it to me when he was still living in Corvallis. Its very interesting to hear that though! I will have to remember that the next time I give this presentation. Thanks!
OSU=Oregon Ag (Score:2)
As we pulled into the campus, The wise-acre grad student driver noticed the sheep barn.
He stated, And to your right, is the student recreation center.
Good Times.