Popular Linux Orgs Freedesktop, Alpine Linux Are Scrambling For New Web Hosting (arstechnica.com) 26
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In what is becoming a sadly regular occurrence, two popular free software projects, X.org/Freedesktop.org and Alpine Linux, need to rally some of their millions of users so that they can continue operating. Both services have largely depended on free server resources provided by Equinix (formerly Packet.net) and its Metal division for the past few years. Equinix announced recently that it was sunsetting its bare-metal sales and services, or renting out physically distinct single computers rather than virtualized and shared hardware. As reported by the Phoronix blog, both free software organizations have until the end of April to find and fund new hosting, with some fairly demanding bandwidth and development needs.
An issue ticket on Freedesktop.org's GitLab repository provides the story and the nitty-gritty needs of that project. Both the X.org foundation (home of the 40-year-old window system) and Freedesktop.org (a shared base of specifications and technology for free software desktops, including Wayland and many more) used Equinix's donated space. [...] Alpine Linux, a small, security-minded distribution used in many containers and embedded devices, also needs a new home quickly. As detailed in its blog, Alpine Linux uses about 800TB of bandwidth each month and also needs continuous integration runners (or separate job agents), as well as a development box. Alpine states it is seeking co-location space and bare-metal servers near the Netherlands, though it will consider virtual machines if bare metal is not feasible.
An issue ticket on Freedesktop.org's GitLab repository provides the story and the nitty-gritty needs of that project. Both the X.org foundation (home of the 40-year-old window system) and Freedesktop.org (a shared base of specifications and technology for free software desktops, including Wayland and many more) used Equinix's donated space. [...] Alpine Linux, a small, security-minded distribution used in many containers and embedded devices, also needs a new home quickly. As detailed in its blog, Alpine Linux uses about 800TB of bandwidth each month and also needs continuous integration runners (or separate job agents), as well as a development box. Alpine states it is seeking co-location space and bare-metal servers near the Netherlands, though it will consider virtual machines if bare metal is not feasible.
Re: Billion/trillion $ corporations should donate (Score:2, Troll)
Dump wouldn't understand any of the words you used, you're going to have to write it for him.
Re: (Score:2)
That's how lobbying works: I write, you sign.
Re: Billion/trillion $ corporations should donate (Score:3)
It's how fascism works, but not how all lobbying works. It's definitely true that corporate lawyers are writing a lot of legislation now, however. It's exactly what Mussolini was talking about.
The cloud is always stormy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Okay, let's say Alpine Linux wasn't in the cloud and was hosting everything on their own servers. Even setting aside the costs of running and maintaining their own hardware - how exactly would they have been paying for that 800TB of data per month? Network bandwidth isn't free... neither is server room space.
WTF is Linux foundation doing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Rhetorical question. As we know, they are paying themselves bloated salaries to cosplay big shots and wasting the remainder on whimsical projects they pull out of their collective asses without bothering to find out from the community what they should actually be doing with their considerable budget. Oh, and they pay Linus so they can boast that Linus works for them.
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Grifters gonna grift. It's a symptom of society.
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The Linux Foundation is inappropriately named, and it's goal has never been to promote Linux, but rather to ensure that Linux developed in a way that was beneficial to the corporate members.
Slackware.com is down for everyone (Score:2)
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Use http instead of https and it'll be up.
Re:Slackware.com is down for everyone (Score:4, Informative)
Slackware is one of my monthly Patreon donations. I can afford $1 each month to keep the oldest distro afloat and free of systemd.
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Neat. I didn't know they had a patreon. I just signed up. I used to use Slackware as my main distro, but I haven't done much with it in years. As I've mostly moved to Debian, Ubuntu, and Zorin on all my machines. I swear, systemd makes Linux a lot harder to use.
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The invisible hand of the free market is not going to give me a reach-around, no matter the demand.
800TB/month? (Score:3)
Someone was being very generous if Alpine Linux was getting that for free.
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Very generous indeed. This is all the more surprising considering that alpine linux has dozens of official mirrors.
"Cheap" hosting or CDNs charge 1c/gig egress which is enormous if they were previously paying $0 for that bandwidth. Cloudflare does free egress of static content if you store your content on their servers, for 1c/gig.
Since Alpine is so frequently used in containers, I think a few of the big cloud providers could sponsor Alpine by caching their content locally at their DCs and providing bandwid
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Let's do some simple maths.
800 TB is 800,000,000 MB.
There are 24 * 30 *3600 seconds in a month.
800000000/(24*30*3600) = 308.642
That's 308 megabytes per second on average, which can easily be served via a 10 Gbps link/
A quick look on lowendtalk.com shows several VPS deals for less than $100 USD for 10 gigabit upstream with 100 TB of transfer. Using them and rounding up, you'd need four, and at $85 each in my example, that's $340.
It's cheaper for colocation because you're supplying the hardware. A quick look
Sorry what? (Score:1)
Wayland was/is being pushed by Redhat = IBM and X is all over the place in paid and free distros. If whoever is hosting it can't pay the bills it's because a) they're bad at business, b) skimming some serious amount off the top (as in the feds probably need to look into it), or c) both stupid and crooked at the same time.
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Living up to your handle I see.
What you propose is one valid hypothesis. I haven't checked. But to assume that it is necessarily the correct one is foolish.
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They didn't have hosting bills. There was nothing to skim. One of their sponsors is no longer giving them the free deal on bare metal hosting, so now they're looking for alternatives.
100 TB of storage and 800 TB of bandwidth?! (Score:2)
100 TB of storage and 800 TB of bandwidth for Alpine Linux?!
Somebody do the math, here. This can't be true.