Re: Using a CDN or some other mirror?

[Meiyo Peng <meiyo.peng@gmail.com>]

Hi,

ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> As you know, berlin.guixsd.org is hosted at the Max Delbrück Center in
> Berlin, a public research institute.  So in a way, we’re already doing
> that.  We shouldn’t take it for granted that public institutes will
> happily host our stuff and donate hardware: without Ricardo’s work and
> the generosity of the MDC, we wouldn’t have anything there.
>
> I understand the reluctance regarding “Big Corp” hosting, and I actually
> share it to some extent.  However, having put much thought into it (and
> also much sweat in build farm sysadmin…), I think the alternative is:
> commercial hosting, or peer-to-peer.
>
> Florian has been looking at the latter approach with IPFS, and perhaps
> we’ll be able to put it in production in a few months and be happy with
> it (I have good hopes given what Florian already demonstrated.)
>
> In the meantime, we need redundant storage, high bandwidth, and high
> availability.  If you know of non-profit organizations that can provide
> such services, please let us know; if not, we’ll resort to a commercial
> service.  The bottom line is: we cannot reasonably pretend to offer such
> a service ourselves.
>
> (Note that we’re just talking about substitute delivery—I wouldn’t want
> to *build* packages on one of these commercial hosting services.)
>
> I hope this clarifies my position.

When I started to try Guix several months ago, the network speed to
substitute servers from China is very slow (<100kB/s). I don't know what
has changed but recently the network speed is about 1MB/s. Thank you all
for the improments. Hopefully a CDN will make the network even better.
I am not against using a commercial service as long as we only use them
to distribute signed packages rather than building packages.

I like the idea of IPFS. We should try it. It would be great if it works
well.

If at some point we need to setup traditional mirrors like other major
Gnu/Linux distros, I can contact my friends in China to setup mirrors in
several universities. I was a member of LUG@USTC, which provides the
largest FLOSS mirror in China.

--
Meiyo Peng