Re: Using a CDN or some other mirror?

[Hartmut Goebel <h.goebel@crazy-compilers.com>]

Am 04.12.2018 um 15:05 schrieb Ludovic Courtès:
> We shouldn’t take it for granted that public institutes will
> happily host our stuff and donate hardware

I would not expect them nor take for granted that some organization will
host and even donate a build-farm. This is indeed very generous from MDC,

As you wrote, we are in need of storage. What I'm suggesting is:

Many, many organizations support open source projects by donating
disk-space and bandwidth in form of a mirror. Supporters are internet
providers, universities, publicly founded organizations  and companies.
In former time this have been ftp-mirrors (later with an
http-interface), in the meanwhile the larger ones support rsync, too.
And many Software projects are using these kind of servers for mirroring
their software. The only restriction is that these mirrors are serving
static files only. (I assume you all know.)

> 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.

One could get in touch with the administrators of some of the mirrors
used by other distributions. [1] has a list of Mirrors for Fedora,
including location and bandwidth. [2] is a list of mirrors used by the
community driven distribution Mageia, additionally including the
"upstream" - which might help prioritizing.

When approaching some of these server admins, we should pass them some
relevant information like expected storage demand, expected transfer
traffic from upstream, how often updates are published, how long to hold
copies, can we provide a rsync server access, etc.

I can approach two or three organizations I know of (but don't have any
contact) if I have some information to provide. A cover letter would
help a lot. For getting in tough with universities somebody working at
an university might have better chances :-)

[1] Fedora 28:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mirrormanager/mirrors/Fedora/28
[2] Mageia: https://mirrors.mageia.org/
[3] Debian "Secondary mirrors" in https://www.debian.org/mirror/list

-- 
+++hartmut

| Hartmut Goebel            |                       |
| hartmut@goebel-consult.de | www.goebel-consult.de |