Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2012-04-24 Thread Duncan Coutts
On Thu, 2012-04-19 at 11:12 -0400, Ryan Newton wrote:
 Hello all,
 
 
 Right now I'm trying to answer a simple question:
   * Would the current Haskell.org / hackage infrastructure benefit
 from the donation of a dedicated VM with good
 bandwidth/uptime?
 Whoever already knows how to do this could configure it.  
 
 
 In trying to answer the above question I found this long email thread
 from 1.5 years ago.  Duncan said the following:
 
 On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 6:47 PM, Duncan Coutts
 duncan.cou...@googlemail.com wrote:
 That's certainly what we've been planning on, that anyone can
 run a
 mirror, no permissions needed. The issue people have raised is
 what
 about having public mirrors that are used automatically or
 semi-automatically by clients.
 
 
 Are there any updates to this in the last year?  Is anybody running a
 mirror?

Yes, we're running a public testing instance of the new hackage server
at:

http://hackage.factisresearch.com/

It has live mirroring running.

This is in a VM donated by factis research, at least on a temporary
basis to help with the testing of the new hackage server code.

I think the answer for the longer term is still yes. We have not yet
discussed with Galois if the new hackage server should be hosted on
their infrastructure. The new code does take more resources and is not
based on apache, so it may not be appropriate to host it on the same
machine as is currently used.

There's two options I think:
 1. a machine for the central hackage server,
 2. a machine for doing package builds

The former will require more organisation, partly because we need the
haskell.org people to have some degree of control over the system. The
latter is easier because the design allows for multiple clients to do
builds rather than just one central machine. So all that requires is a
user account to upload the data. (plus the small matter of a working
build bot client software, which is where scoutess may help)

Duncan



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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2012-04-24 Thread Ryan Newton

 There's two options I think:
 1. a machine for the central hackage server,
 2. a machine for doing package builds

 The former will require more organisation, partly because we need the
 haskell.org people to have some degree of control over the system. The
 latter is easier because the design allows for multiple clients to do
 builds rather than just one central machine. So all that requires is a
 user account to upload the data. (plus the small matter of a working
 build bot client software, which is where scoutess may help)


I wonder if this could get to the point where it could be done seti-at-home
style, farmed out via a VM image.  That is people would run the image to
provide resources (and geographic distribution) to the build server cloud.
 Maybe they get a fast local mirror as a reward.

If it were every that easy I would certainly love to run a VM!

  -Ryan
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2012-04-24 Thread Ryan Newton

 I wonder if this could get to the point where it could be done
 seti-at-home style, farmed out via a VM image.  That is people would run
 the image to provide resources (and geographic distribution) to the build
 server cloud.  Maybe they get a fast local mirror as a reward.

 If it were every that easy I would certainly love to run a VM!


Surprisingly BOINC seems to *not* be virtualized and instead just runs
native applications.
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2012-04-19 Thread Ryan Newton
Hello all,

Right now I'm trying to answer a simple question:

   - Would the current Haskell.org / hackage infrastructure benefit from
   the donation of a dedicated VM with good bandwidth/uptime?

Whoever already knows how to do this could configure it.

In trying to answer the above question I found this long email thread from
1.5 years ago.  Duncan said the following:

On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 6:47 PM, Duncan Coutts
duncan.cou...@googlemail.comwrote:

 That's certainly what we've been planning on, that anyone can run a
 mirror, no permissions needed. The issue people have raised is what
 about having public mirrors that are used automatically or
 semi-automatically by clients.


Are there any updates to this in the last year?  Is anybody running a
mirror?

The other reason I've been thinking about this is the scoutess project.
 More public testing or continuous integration facilities would require
more hardware resources.

  -Ryan
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2012-04-19 Thread Alp Mestanogullari
Hi,

On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 5:12 PM, Ryan Newton rrnew...@gmail.com wrote:


- Would the current Haskell.org / hackage infrastructure benefit from
the donation of a dedicated VM with good bandwidth/uptime?

 I can think about at the very least one project (the one you mention
below) that would benefit from it. But I think there are a *lot* more that
I don't know about too.


 Are there any updates to this in the last year?  Is anybody running a
 mirror?


I know about http://hackage.factisresearch.com/ and
http://hackage2.uptoisomorphism.net/ but they both run Hackage2.0 I think.


 The other reason I've been thinking about this is the scoutess project.
  More public testing or continuous integration facilities would require
 more hardware resources.


Yes. We have talked about this with Duncan. He was wondering whether there
was a way to get scoutess to handle the build bot part of Hackage2.0 and
we will develop it so that it can. However, with Jeremy we intend to let
people distribute their builds on several machines so you will not be
forced to have one machine do all the work.

Of course we are not there yet, but I thought you would appreciate hearing
about what is planned for scoutess.

-- 
Alp
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2012-04-19 Thread David Terei
On 19 April 2012 08:12, Ryan Newton rrnew...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hello all,

 Right now I'm trying to answer a simple question:

 Would the current Haskell.org / hackage infrastructure benefit from the
 donation of a dedicated VM with good bandwidth/uptime?

 Whoever already knows how to do this could configure it.

 In trying to answer the above question I found this long email thread from
 1.5 years ago.  Duncan said the following:

 On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 6:47 PM, Duncan Coutts duncan.cou...@googlemail.com
 wrote:

 That's certainly what we've been planning on, that anyone can run a
 mirror, no permissions needed. The issue people have raised is what
 about having public mirrors that are used automatically or
 semi-automatically by clients.


 Are there any updates to this in the last year?  Is anybody running a
 mirror?

I am.

http://hackage.scs.stanford.edu/


 The other reason I've been thinking about this is the scoutess project.
  More public testing or continuous integration facilities would require more
 hardware resources.

The computer it's running on has 16 cores and 48GB of ram. I have
access to a few other computers like this.

Cheers,
David


   -Ryan


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2012-04-19 Thread David Terei
Oh yes, it's hackage2... not hackage1.

On 19 April 2012 11:50, David Terei dave.te...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 19 April 2012 08:12, Ryan Newton rrnew...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hello all,

 Right now I'm trying to answer a simple question:

 Would the current Haskell.org / hackage infrastructure benefit from the
 donation of a dedicated VM with good bandwidth/uptime?

 Whoever already knows how to do this could configure it.

 In trying to answer the above question I found this long email thread from
 1.5 years ago.  Duncan said the following:

 On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 6:47 PM, Duncan Coutts duncan.cou...@googlemail.com
 wrote:

 That's certainly what we've been planning on, that anyone can run a
 mirror, no permissions needed. The issue people have raised is what
 about having public mirrors that are used automatically or
 semi-automatically by clients.


 Are there any updates to this in the last year?  Is anybody running a
 mirror?

 I am.

 http://hackage.scs.stanford.edu/


 The other reason I've been thinking about this is the scoutess project.
  More public testing or continuous integration facilities would require more
 hardware resources.

 The computer it's running on has 16 cores and 48GB of ram. I have
 access to a few other computers like this.

 Cheers,
 David


   -Ryan


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-14 Thread Markus Läll
The reason for mirror was avilability, yes, and when the signatures were
only on the central sever, then the user could choose not to install
packages from mirrors, when they were not available.

But now if the signatures were generated by the uploader, then the morrors
would be just as secure as the central? I mean -- if we don't trust DNS,
then the main hackage has no special security advantages?


--
Markus Läll
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-13 Thread Paul Sargent
On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 19:51, Brandon S Allbery KF8NH
allb...@ece.cmu.eduwrote:

 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
 Hash: SHA1

 On 12/9/10 16:04 , Richard O'Keefe wrote:
  I thought X is a mirror of Y meant X would be a read-only replica of Y,
  with some sort of protocol between X and Y to keep X up to date.
  As long as the material from Y replicated at X is *supposed* to be
  publicly available, I don't see a security problem here.  Only Y accepts
  updates from outside, and it continues to do whatever authentication it
  would do without a mirror.  The mirror X would *not* accept updates.

 The above assumes that the operator of the mirror is trustworthy.  It
 wouldn't be difficult for a hostile party to set up a mirror, but then
 modify the packages to include malware payloads --- if the packages aren't
 signed.  (Or even if they are signed if it's a sufficiently weak algorithm.
  MD5 is already unusable for the purpose.)


How about, as a cheep and cheerful method to get up running. If the premise
is that the original server is trustworthy and the mirrors aren't, then:

1) Hash all packages on the original server.
2) Hash goes into a side car file (e.g. packagename.sha) that lives next
to the package
3) Modify cabal so that it can install from a mirror, but always gets the
hash from the original server.
4) Before install you check the hash is correct.

This gives you a few things:

1) Every package downloaded from a mirror is guarenteed to be the same as
downloading from the original server. This seems to avoid most peoples
security concern.
2) Although there's a transfer from the central server for every download,
it's low bandwidth, so he majority of the load is tranfered to the mirror.
3) If the central server goes down a user could elect to ignore the hash,
and still get the package.

If this isn't enough then you're down the road of a GPG based solution.
Setting up some signing keys for packages, distributing the public halves to
all clients, etc, etc... If that's the road you want I'd suggest looking at
how Debian solved the problem. http://wiki.debian.org/SecureApt
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-13 Thread wren ng thornton

On 12/13/10 8:25 AM, Paul Sargent wrote:

How about, as a cheep and cheerful method to get up running. If the premise
is that the original server is trustworthy and the mirrors aren't, then:

1) Hash all packages on the original server.
2) Hash goes into a side car file (e.g.packagename.sha) that lives next
to the package


I still contend that we shouldn't have to trust the central server 
either. The hash can be created alongside the sdist on the maintainer's 
computer, and then both are uploaded to central. Thus, the maintainer 
can verify that the hash on central matches their own, which ensures that:


(a) the hash that central has is trustworthy
(b) no man-in-the-middle corrupted the sending of the hash to central

These concerns are separate from using the hash to confirm the 
consistency of the sdist itself. Remember: metadata can be compromised 
just as easily as data. And the fewer machines we have to trust, the 
better. Moreover, this approach requires the same amount of 
implementation work as getting central to make the hashes.


--
Live well,
~wren

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-13 Thread Richard O'Keefe

On 14/12/2010, at 2:25 AM, Paul Sargent wrote:

 
 
 On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 19:51, Brandon S Allbery KF8NH allb...@ece.cmu.edu 
 wrote:
 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
 Hash: SHA1
 
 On 12/9/10 16:04 , Richard O'Keefe wrote:
  I thought X is a mirror of Y meant X would be a read-only replica of Y,
  with some sort of protocol between X and Y to keep X up to date.
  As long as the material from Y replicated at X is *supposed* to be
  publicly available, I don't see a security problem here.  Only Y accepts
  updates from outside, and it continues to do whatever authentication it
  would do without a mirror.  The mirror X would *not* accept updates.
 
 The above assumes that the operator of the mirror is trustworthy.  It
 wouldn't be difficult for a hostile party to set up a mirror, but then
 modify the packages to include malware payloads --- if the packages aren't
 signed.  (Or even if they are signed if it's a sufficiently weak algorithm.
  MD5 is already unusable for the purpose.)

True, but right now we're vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, DNS
spoofing, and a whole lot of other things.  If there is any way to be
sure that what I see when I visit hackage.haskell.org is the *real*
hackage, my browser doesn't know about it.
 
 How about, as a cheep and cheerful method to get up running. If the premise 
 is that the original server is trustworthy and the mirrors aren't, then:
 
 1) Hash all packages on the original server.
 2) Hash goes into a side car file (e.g. packagename.sha) that lives next to 
 the package
 3) Modify cabal so that it can install from a mirror, but always gets the 
 hash from the original server.
 4) Before install you check the hash is correct.

This suffers from two problems.
A.  I am willing to grant that the original server is trustworthy,
but DNS lookup gives me the address of the original server and not a 
spoofer
seems every bit as dodgy an assumption as the trustworthiness of the 
mirrors.
B.  Wasn't the original motivation for wanting mirrors *availablity*?  If you 
have
to get the hash from the original server and the original server is down, 
then
having a mirror has done you no good at all.

Perhaps someone on this list understands what CRAN does could explain it here.
I know that the R install.packages(...) command goes through mirrors.



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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-13 Thread Brandon Moore


On Dec 13, 2010, at 6:15 PM, wren ng thornton w...@freegeek.org wrote:

On 12/13/10 8:25 AM, Paul Sargent wrote:
How about, as a cheep and cheerful method to get up running. If the premise
is that the original server is trustworthy and the mirrors aren't, then:

1) Hash all packages on the original server.
2) Hash goes into a side car file (e.g.packagename.sha) that lives next
to the package


If hashed are added to the package information cabal update downloads, 
installing packages from mirrors will continue to work during a central outage.

I still contend that we shouldn't have to trust the central server either. The 
hash can be created alongside the sdist on the maintainer's computer, and then 
both are uploaded to central. Thus, the maintainer can verify that the hash on 
central matches their own, which ensures that:

For now, it's enough to find a simple scheme where adding untrusted mirrors is 
no worse than the current situation. Hashes seem to work for that:
1. cabal update always reads from the central server (if uploads are impossible 
when the central server is down, the package lit won't even get stale)
2. The package descriptions are extended with hashes
3. Cabal may download packages from mirrors, but checks the hash.

Your proposal doesn't narrow trust to the maintainers (which is currently open 
to the public anyway), because an adversary as described could return the 
correct hash and package for the maintainer, and the corrupted version to 
others.

Brandon


  

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-11 Thread wren ng thornton

On 12/9/10 4:04 PM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:


On 10/12/2010, at 12:18 AM, Markus Läll wrote:


My take on the issue is that we should make it possible to easily mirror 
hackage (what the OP asked for), so that people could use it when they wanted 
to, and have a list of the mirrors on the wiki. This way those who are 
interested can use them. Like when the mirror is faster/closer to them or to 
help out when hackage is temporarily down. Those who need the security can 
choose not to use mirrors, or make their own (private), or develop a secure 
scheme, when it doesn't exist yet.


Have I misunderstood something?
I thought X is a mirror of Y meant X would be a read-only replica of Y,
with some sort of protocol between X and Y to keep X up to date.
As long as the material from Y replicated at X is *supposed* to be
publicly available, I don't see a security problem here.  Only Y accepts
updates from outside, and it continues to do whatever authentication it
would do without a mirror.  The mirror X would *not* accept updates.


The security issue is how does a client, C, know to trust X (maybe X is 
evil) or know to trust the transmission of data from Y to X (maybe a man 
in the middle corrupted things and X has become a confused deputy), etc.


The concern isn't for the consistency of Y's data, it's for the 
consistency of X's data as a replica of Y's.


--
Live well,
~wren

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-11 Thread wren ng thornton

On 12/11/10 5:59 AM, wren ng thornton wrote:

On 12/9/10 4:04 PM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:

As long as the material from Y replicated at X is *supposed* to be
publicly available, I don't see a security problem here. Only Y accepts
updates from outside, and it continues to do whatever authentication it
would do without a mirror. The mirror X would *not* accept updates.


The security issue is how does a client, C, know to trust X (maybe X is
evil) or know to trust the transmission of data from Y to X (maybe a man
in the middle corrupted things and X has become a confused deputy), etc.


P.S., X can't really be a confused deputy here since X has no special 
privileges[1], rather X would become more of a confused librarian: 
y'know, the kindly old but somewhat senile librarian who occasionally 
mistakes your requests (like that time they gave you Cujo when you asked 
for a book on the care and feeding of pets, or the time they gave you 
some writings by the Marquis de Sade when you were doing research for 
your anatomy class).



[1] The implicit trust C has for X usually isn't counted as a 
privilege in the security world.


--
Live well,
~wren

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-11 Thread Brandon S Allbery KF8NH
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

On 12/9/10 16:04 , Richard O'Keefe wrote:
 I thought X is a mirror of Y meant X would be a read-only replica of Y,
 with some sort of protocol between X and Y to keep X up to date.
 As long as the material from Y replicated at X is *supposed* to be
 publicly available, I don't see a security problem here.  Only Y accepts
 updates from outside, and it continues to do whatever authentication it
 would do without a mirror.  The mirror X would *not* accept updates.

The above assumes that the operator of the mirror is trustworthy.  It
wouldn't be difficult for a hostile party to set up a mirror, but then
modify the packages to include malware payloads --- if the packages aren't
signed.  (Or even if they are signed if it's a sufficiently weak algorithm.
 MD5 is already unusable for the purpose.)

Other possibilities include MITM attacks where the hostile party detects
that someone is attempting to download a package and spoofs a reply that
directs it to a different package.

(Or more complex tricks; see
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.167.4096rep=rep1type=pdf
for examples.)

- -- 
brandon s. allbery [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl]  allb...@kf8nh.com
system administrator  [openafs,heimdal,too many hats]  allb...@ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university  KF8NH
-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
Version: GnuPG v2.0.10 (Darwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

iEYEARECAAYFAk0D1jcACgkQIn7hlCsL25V3dQCfZ4zdF9KXNNS7bA35CL33e00q
FzUAnAvQiRhElO/86qgagtKzv/cwgQfJ
=DxV9
-END PGP SIGNATURE-

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-09 Thread Vincent Hanquez

 On 08/12/10 20:25, Luke Palmer wrote:

I could upload a new version of mtl if I wanted.  Plenty of people
would install it.


Correct me if i'm wrong; You would appear in the UploadedBy, and then 
you might be challenged by the traditional uploaders or attentive users 
(most users wouldn't know of course) to give a reason of doing the upload.


--
Vincent

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-09 Thread Vincent Hanquez

 On 08/12/10 10:41, Ketil Malde wrote:

Yes.  And you should start with assessing how much cost and
inconvenience you are willing to suffer for the improvement in
security you gain.  In this case, my assertion is that the marginal
worsening of security by having a mirror of hackage even without signing
of packages etc., is less than the marginal improvement in usability.

I'm a bit surprised to find that there seems to be a lot of opposition
to this view, but perhaps the existing structure is more secure than I
thought?  Or the benefit of a mirror is exaggerated - I can see how
it would be annoying to have hackage down, but it hasn't happened to my,
so perhaps those complaining about it just were very unlucky.


You might have misunderstood what I was talking about. I'm proposing 
signing on the hackage server on reception of the package,
where it can be verified by cabal that the package hasn't been signed 
properly. This is not about all the way
signing of every uploaders, with chain of trust and such (which has been 
proposed by wren).


The implication on the users should be minimal. I mean they shouldn't 
even know about it. It would only complain if the signature isn't valid.


--
Vincent

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-09 Thread Markus Läll
My take on the issue is that we should make it possible to easily mirror
hackage (what the OP asked for), so that people could use it when they
wanted to, and have a list of the mirrors on the wiki. This way those who
are interested can use them. Like when the mirror is faster/closer to them
or to help out when hackage is temporarily down. Those who need the security
can choose not to use mirrors, or make their own (private), or develop a
secure scheme, when it doesn't exist yet.

It's perfectly understandable, that people doing work/serious stuff need the
guarantees, but I bet a many of us are just playing around and developing
things for themselves.

--
Markus Läll
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-09 Thread Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
On 9 December 2010 20:55, Vincent Hanquez t...@snarc.org wrote:

 You might have misunderstood what I was talking about. I'm proposing signing
 on the hackage server on reception of the package,
 where it can be verified by cabal that the package hasn't been signed
 properly.

By cabal, are you referring to Cabal or cabal-install?  If the
former, then I'm not sure how exactly it would do such verification
since it doesn't have any notion of the internet as far as I'm aware;
if the latter then it means absolutely nothing for those of us that do
not use cabal-install for most packages.

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
ivan.miljeno...@gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-09 Thread Vincent Hanquez
On Thu, Dec 09, 2010 at 10:45:39PM +1100, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
 On 9 December 2010 20:55, Vincent Hanquez t...@snarc.org wrote:
 
  You might have misunderstood what I was talking about. I'm proposing signing
  on the hackage server on reception of the package,
  where it can be verified by cabal that the package hasn't been signed
  properly.
 
 By cabal, are you referring to Cabal or cabal-install?  If the
 former, then I'm not sure how exactly it would do such verification
 since it doesn't have any notion of the internet as far as I'm aware;
 if the latter then it means absolutely nothing for those of us that do
 not use cabal-install for most packages.

I don't really know the difference between Cabal and cabal-install, but

Something is downloading the .tar.gz, and that thing can always download an 
extra
.tar.gz.sign file which contains a way to verify that's the .tar.gz is genuinely
the one that has been received by hackage.

For those not using the thing-that-download-archive to get their package from
hackage, they can build the same mechanism that download an extra file, and
check the signature. Or they can even choose not to bother, and just download
the package as they just did before.

Note that, I'm not actually inventing anything new here, this is a common way
to distribute software (linux distributions, many opensource softwares, etc).

-- 
Vincent

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-09 Thread Richard O'Keefe

On 10/12/2010, at 12:18 AM, Markus Läll wrote:

 My take on the issue is that we should make it possible to easily mirror 
 hackage (what the OP asked for), so that people could use it when they wanted 
 to, and have a list of the mirrors on the wiki. This way those who are 
 interested can use them. Like when the mirror is faster/closer to them or to 
 help out when hackage is temporarily down. Those who need the security can 
 choose not to use mirrors, or make their own (private), or develop a secure 
 scheme, when it doesn't exist yet.

Have I misunderstood something?
I thought X is a mirror of Y meant X would be a read-only replica of Y,
with some sort of protocol between X and Y to keep X up to date.
As long as the material from Y replicated at X is *supposed* to be
publicly available, I don't see a security problem here.  Only Y accepts
updates from outside, and it continues to do whatever authentication it
would do without a mirror.  The mirror X would *not* accept updates.


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-09 Thread Riad S. Wahby
Richard O'Keefe o...@cs.otago.ac.nz wrote:
 I thought X is a mirror of Y meant X would be a read-only replica of Y,
 with some sort of protocol between X and Y to keep X up to date.
 As long as the material from Y replicated at X is *supposed* to be
 publicly available, I don't see a security problem here.  Only Y accepts
 updates from outside, and it continues to do whatever authentication it
 would do without a mirror.  The mirror X would *not* accept updates.

At the very least, this assumes that you trust all the mirror operators.

Sure, I'm trustworthy, but how about those other guys? :)

-=rsw

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-09 Thread Markus Läll
On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 11:04 PM, Richard O'Keefe o...@cs.otago.ac.nz wrote:


 On 10/12/2010, at 12:18 AM, Markus Läll wrote:

  My take on the issue is that we should make it possible to easily mirror
 hackage (what the OP asked for), so that people could use it when they
 wanted to, and have a list of the mirrors on the wiki. This way those who
 are interested can use them. Like when the mirror is faster/closer to them
 or to help out when hackage is temporarily down. Those who need the security
 can choose not to use mirrors, or make their own (private), or develop a
 secure scheme, when it doesn't exist yet.

 Have I misunderstood something?
 I thought X is a mirror of Y meant X would be a read-only replica of Y,
 with some sort of protocol between X and Y to keep X up to date.
 As long as the material from Y replicated at X is *supposed* to be
 publicly available, I don't see a security problem here.  Only Y accepts
 updates from outside, and it continues to do whatever authentication it
 would do without a mirror.  The mirror X would *not* accept updates.


Yes, that's what I think of mirrors too. I don't know if that was what you
meant, but yes those mirrors would be just passive copies of the real
hackage server (no updates from a user), and serve as a place to download
packages from until the original hackage comes back.

But for the security issue, ofcourse any host of a mirror could abuse that.
But I think for non-critical stuff I wouldn't mind using the mirror if it
has shown to be trustworthy. And for people  using Haskell a lot, if the
making of your own mirror is as simple as installing some package on your
webserver and running it, then this would be a great remedy against those
hours when something has happened to hackage..

--
Markus Läll
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-09 Thread Duncan Coutts
On 9 December 2010 21:04, Richard O'Keefe o...@cs.otago.ac.nz wrote:

 On 10/12/2010, at 12:18 AM, Markus Läll wrote:

 My take on the issue is that we should make it possible to easily mirror 
 hackage (what the OP asked for), so that people could use it when they 
 wanted to, and have a list of the mirrors on the wiki. This way those who 
 are interested can use them. Like when the mirror is faster/closer to them 
 or to help out when hackage is temporarily down. Those who need the security 
 can choose not to use mirrors, or make their own (private), or develop a 
 secure scheme, when it doesn't exist yet.

 Have I misunderstood something?
 I thought X is a mirror of Y meant X would be a read-only replica of Y,
 with some sort of protocol between X and Y to keep X up to date.
 As long as the material from Y replicated at X is *supposed* to be
 publicly available, I don't see a security problem here.  Only Y accepts
 updates from outside, and it continues to do whatever authentication it
 would do without a mirror.  The mirror X would *not* accept updates.

That's certainly what we've been planning on, that anyone can run a
mirror, no permissions needed. The issue people have raised is what
about having public mirrors that are used automatically or
semi-automatically by clients.

The suggestion about DNS round robin is transparent to clients but
requires all the mirrors to be a master, or to have some forwarding
system. Any transparent system also needs trust.

My opinion is that at this stage it is not really worth doing anything
complicated. We do not yet have a bandwidth problem. Once there are
more (unpriviledged) public and private mirrors then temporary
downtime on the main server is less problematic. Eventually we'll get
a bandwidth problem but I think we've  got a fair bit of time to
prepare and in the mean time we can get simple unpriviledged mirroring
working. That is mostly an issue of specifications and tools. The spec
for package archives is not as clear or as good as we'd like. We've
been discussing it recently on the cabal-devel mailing list.

Duncan

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-09 Thread Richard O'Keefe

On 10/12/2010, at 10:50 AM, Riad S. Wahby wrote:

 Richard O'Keefe o...@cs.otago.ac.nz wrote:
 I thought X is a mirror of Y meant X would be a read-only replica of Y,
 with some sort of protocol between X and Y to keep X up to date.
 As long as the material from Y replicated at X is *supposed* to be
 publicly available, I don't see a security problem here.  Only Y accepts
 updates from outside, and it continues to do whatever authentication it
 would do without a mirror.  The mirror X would *not* accept updates.
 
 At the very least, this assumes that you trust all the mirror operators.
 
 Sure, I'm trustworthy, but how about those other guys? :)

See the words some sort of protocol between X and Y?

This means that Y has to be authenticated to X and X to Y and they
use some sort of encryption scheme that prevents man-in-the-middle
attacks.

Right now, of course, nothing whatever stops someone building a 'robot'
at X to visit Y periodically and update X; the missing piece is any
kind of accreditation at Y.



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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-08 Thread Ketil Malde
Darrin Chandler dwchand...@stilyagin.com writes:

 It's not obvious to me that adding a mirror makes the infrastructure
 more more insecure.  Any particular concerns?  (I hope I qualify as
 naïve here :-)

 If you run a mirror people will come to you for software to run on their
 machines. I see a way to take advantage of that immediately.

My apologies for not expressing myself more clearly.  What I mean is
that currently, Hackage has a ton of users, each of whom may at whim
upload a new version of any library.  It's not clear to me that security
is significantly worsened by adding a mirror.

Assume I am out with ill intent:  I can now either a) set up a mirror,
replace some central library with my evil trojan, launch a DOS attack
against hackage.haskell.org to get users to switch, and gloat in my
secret castle as I await the fruits of my cunning schemes -- or I can
b) just upload my trojan library to hackage directly.

http://flaam.org/~jont/humor/uke48/Friends_of_Irony/image007.jpg

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-08 Thread Vincent Hanquez

 On 08/12/10 08:13, Ketil Malde wrote:

My apologies for not expressing myself more clearly.  What I mean is
that currently, Hackage has a ton of users, each of whom may at whim
upload a new version of any library.  It's not clear to me that security
is significantly worsened by adding a mirror.

Assume I am out with ill intent:  I can now either a) set up a mirror,
replace some central library with my evil trojan, launch a DOS attack
against hackage.haskell.org to get users to switch, and gloat in my
secret castle as I await the fruits of my cunning schemes -- or I can
b) just upload my trojan library to hackage directly.

You have to start somewhere with security.

I think that an uploaded trojan library would be at least detectable as 
such, since the uploading user would have change (i'm not sure that what 
you had in mind ?).


Whereas on a mirror, it would be completely transparent to the users.

As a first step, having the hackage server and its users trusted, is 
hopefully reasonable. And then you can build up from there. This would 
be nice to be proactive before we actually detect such a thing, and we 
have to build a security infrastructure anyway ;)


--
Vincent

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-08 Thread Ketil Malde
Vincent Hanquez t...@snarc.org writes:

 You have to start somewhere with security.

Yes.  And you should start with assessing how much cost and
inconvenience you are willing to suffer for the improvement in
security you gain.  In this case, my assertion is that the marginal
worsening of security by having a mirror of hackage even without signing
of packages etc., is less than the marginal improvement in usability. 

I'm a bit surprised to find that there seems to be a lot of opposition
to this view, but perhaps the existing structure is more secure than I
thought?  Or the benefit of a mirror is exaggerated - I can see how
it would be annoying to have hackage down, but it hasn't happened to my,
so perhaps those complaining about it just were very unlucky.

 Whereas on a mirror, it would be completely transparent to the users.

Well - you could easily compare packages from the main repo and its
mirror to verify the integrity.  This isn't a lot harder than checking
the details of the stuff cabal-install pulls in (which I admittedly
never do either).

 As a first step, having the hackage server and its users trusted, is
 hopefully reasonable. 

Hard to evaluate before there is a concrete proposal - security is
always a trade off, and you need to know what you get and what you pay.
If you can outline the structure of how this could work, I'm happy to
bikeshed it.

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-08 Thread Darrin Chandler
On Wed, Dec 08, 2010 at 11:41:31AM +0100, Ketil Malde wrote:
 Vincent Hanquez t...@snarc.org writes:
 
  You have to start somewhere with security.
 
 Yes.  And you should start with assessing how much cost and
 inconvenience you are willing to suffer for the improvement in
 security you gain.  In this case, my assertion is that the marginal
 worsening of security by having a mirror of hackage even without signing
 of packages etc., is less than the marginal improvement in usability. 
 
 I'm a bit surprised to find that there seems to be a lot of opposition
 to this view, but perhaps the existing structure is more secure than I
 thought?  Or the benefit of a mirror is exaggerated - I can see how
 it would be annoying to have hackage down, but it hasn't happened to my,
 so perhaps those complaining about it just were very unlucky.

Having one glaring security problem is not a good reason to introduce
another one. It just makes more to fix.

As for mirroring, I'm all in favor of any random user doing a mirror.
The only place I see a problem is making those official mirrors. If
you were to mirror and announce that you had one then I can trust you or
not. There are some people I would trust to have valid mirrors.

Darrin

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-08 Thread C. McCann
On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 5:41 AM, Ketil Malde ke...@malde.org wrote:
 I'm a bit surprised to find that there seems to be a lot of opposition
 to this view, but perhaps the existing structure is more secure than I
 thought?

The difference is in the ability to influence other packages and
metadata, I think. You could upload a trojan to Hackage right now, but
who would ever install it? You could go to the effort of becoming
responsible for a package that people do use and then slip the trojan
in later, but the update to the package will still be visible
and--since this is now a package that people actually use--some
do-gooder will probably stumble on your nefarious plot in the process
of simple compatibility checking or such.

On the other hand, by running a malicious mirror, nothing stops you
from inserting (unsafePerformIO installRootKit) into the bytestring
package with no indication of a change.

All of this applies equally to Hackage as it stands, of course, the
difference being the implicit trust the community puts in the people
with administrative power over it. If someone else who already has
that degree of informal trust put up a mirror I don't think anyone
would have a problem using it.

As always security is a matter of degree, but Hackage is just
high-profile enough that a bit of care is probably warranted. And I
suspect that most worthwhile interim solutions to add a bit of trust
for mirrors would be almost as much effort as a complete solution.

- C.

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-08 Thread Luke Palmer
On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 8:29 AM, C. McCann c...@uptoisomorphism.net wrote:
 On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 5:41 AM, Ketil Malde ke...@malde.org wrote:
 I'm a bit surprised to find that there seems to be a lot of opposition
 to this view, but perhaps the existing structure is more secure than I
 thought?

 The difference is in the ability to influence other packages and
 metadata, I think. You could upload a trojan to Hackage right now, but
 who would ever install it?

I could upload a new version of mtl if I wanted.  Plenty of people
would install it.

Luke

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-07 Thread Ketil Malde
Dan Knapp dan...@gmail.com writes:

 I agree that signed packages are a good idea.  We should move with all
 haste to implement them.  But I'm not sure we want to hold up
 everything else while we wait for that.  

IMO, mirroring is orthogonal to that, too.

 That's also my take on a peer-peer repository, as I said already.  

Do you mean a two-way sync here?  I think it'd be way easier to just set
up a slave repo using rsync, and let people edit their .cabal/configs.
But I don't really know the internals, perhaps there are implementation
details of cabal or hackage that complicates this?

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-07 Thread Brandon S Allbery KF8NH
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

On 12/7/10 08:07 , Ketil Malde wrote:
 Dan Knapp dan...@gmail.com writes:
 I agree that signed packages are a good idea.  We should move with all
 haste to implement them.  But I'm not sure we want to hold up
 everything else while we wait for that.  
 
 IMO, mirroring is orthogonal to that, too.

Only if you consider security a minor or non-issue.  I'm tempted to say
anyone who believes that on the modern Internet is at best naïve.  (Although
admittedly security is one of my work foci.)

- -- 
brandon s. allbery [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl]  allb...@kf8nh.com
system administrator  [openafs,heimdal,too many hats]  allb...@ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university  KF8NH
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VV0AoJVgmDbBZyZtcX57fGWkGeW2dT/3
=Gqlm
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-07 Thread Duncan Coutts
On 4 December 2010 16:31, Dan Knapp dan...@gmail.com wrote:
 With Hackage down, now seemed like a good time to push this issue
 again.  It's such an important site to us that it's really rather a
 shame there are no mirrors of it.  I have a personal-and-business
 server in a data center in Newark, with a fair chunk of bandwidth,
 which I'd like to offer for a permanent mirror.  Is there interest in
 this?  Who do I need to talk to for it to happen?

At the recent hackathon we were working on hackage mirroring.

By this we do not mean just using rsync to sync the current
combination of filestore + cgi programs that make up the current
hackage implementation. We want to make it easy to set up dumb or
smart package archives and to do nearly-live mirroring.

We have a pototype hackage-mirror client that can poll two servers and
copy packages from one instance to the other. This assumes the target
is a smart mirror (e.g. an instance of the new hackage-server impl).
We also need to be able to target local dumb mirrors that are just
passive collections of files.

 Strategy-wise, I think the best approach is round-robin DNS, since
 that's transparent to the end user - everything would still appear at
 the URL it's at now, but behind-the-scenes magic would let things keep
 working when one or the other site is down.  I haven't personally set
 up such a system before but I'm willing to take on the burden of
 figuring it out.

This is a somewhat orthogonal issue since I think you're talking about
multiple master smart servers that can accept uploads.

Duncan

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-07 Thread Ketil Malde
Brandon S Allbery KF8NH allb...@ece.cmu.edu writes:

 IMO, mirroring is orthogonal to that, too.

 Only if you consider security a minor or non-issue.  

What I mean is that you can mirror a repository regardless of whether
packages are signed or not.

 I'm tempted to say anyone who believes that on the modern Internet is
 at best naïve.

It's not obvious to me that adding a mirror makes the infrastructure
more more insecure.  Any particular concerns?  (I hope I qualify as
naïve here :-)

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-07 Thread Darrin Chandler
On Tue, Dec 07, 2010 at 11:04:04PM +0100, Ketil Malde wrote:
 It's not obvious to me that adding a mirror makes the infrastructure
 more more insecure.  Any particular concerns?  (I hope I qualify as
 naïve here :-)

If you run a mirror people will come to you for software to run on their
machines. I see a way to take advantage of that immediately.

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-07 Thread Brandon S Allbery KF8NH
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

On 12/7/10 18:53 , Darrin Chandler wrote:
 On Tue, Dec 07, 2010 at 11:04:04PM +0100, Ketil Malde wrote:
 It's not obvious to me that adding a mirror makes the infrastructure
 more more insecure.  Any particular concerns?  (I hope I qualify as
 naïve here :-)
 
 If you run a mirror people will come to you for software to run on their
 machines. I see a way to take advantage of that immediately.

Exactly.  And this isn't theoretical; fake packages and packages with extra
payloads injected into them are fairly common.

- -- 
brandon s. allbery [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl]  allb...@kf8nh.com
system administrator  [openafs,heimdal,too many hats]  allb...@ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university  KF8NH
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=x2Gr
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-06 Thread wren ng thornton

On 12/6/10 2:35 AM, Vincent Hanquez wrote:

I would really like mirrors too.

But before that happens it would be nice to have signed packages on
Hackage, preventing
a mirror to distribute compromised stuff (intentionally or
unintentionally).


+1.

This should be done during sdist, before uploading, so that maintainers 
can be sure that the central mirror gets the right thing too.


--
Live well,
~wren

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-06 Thread Dan Knapp
Wow, this thread got long.  Good!  I'm hopeful that we can take some
action now. :)

My views on the issues that have been raised -

The Haskell steering committee is a good thing and I fully support
them.  I also support the current maintainer of the site; I don't want
to take over or anything, only to assist.  In fact, I'll go further,
please don't anybody attempt to foist any high-level responsibility on
me.  I'm a bad receptacle for it.  But I do have these technological
resources at my disposal and there's no reason the community shouldn't
benefit from them.

Re incorporation, the person who said that it has to happen was
dead-on.  So the rest of the discussion on that point is moot.  But
it's quite independent of when and how we set up mirroring.

I agree that signed packages are a good idea.  We should move with all
haste to implement them.  But I'm not sure we want to hold up
everything else while we wait for that.  That's also my take on a
peer-peer repository, as I said already.  Can somebody who understands
the technologies typically used for this suggest one, and possibly
also talk to dcoutts directly to make him aware of the discussion and
get his thoughts on how to implement it?  I've found he often makes
points that save me a lot of work. :)

I can certainly conceive of life events that could take my attention,
despite all good intentions, in much the fashion that the current
maintainer's often is.  (That's awkward to say - what's his name,
again?  I know I should know it...  It's not dcoutts, is it?)  So I
want to build something that works well with minimal manual
intervention.

I was of the impression that most of the members of the steering
committee were on this list, which is one reason I posted here.  Is
there some other way I should contact them?

I will talk to dcoutts, and see what the current status of the
distributed-operation code is and figure out how much time I can
devote to helping with that.


-- 
Dan Knapp
An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to
be devoured. (Konrad Adenauer)

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-05 Thread Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
On 5 December 2010 18:41, Florian Lengyel florian.leng...@gmail.com wrote:
 Why is there even any consideration of some committee if someone wants to
 mirror the Hackage site? Why not mirror the site?

Presumably to make it an official mirror, and possibly due to the
licenses of some content on there.

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
ivan.miljeno...@gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-05 Thread wren ng thornton

On 12/4/10 10:34 PM, wren ng thornton wrote:

FWIW, I've been on the board of directors for a 501(c)(3), helped write
their bylaws, and know a few people in the business (lawyers, etc). I'm
willing to offer advice, effort, and references whenever the committee
decides to do this.


I tried cc-ing my previous to commit...@haskell.org but got

commit...@haskell.org: host haskell.org[78.46.100.180] said:
550 Unrouteable address (in reply to RCPT TO command)

Did I get the address wrong, or does this have to do with the electrical 
downtime?


--
Live well,
~wren

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-05 Thread Ketil Malde
Florian Lengyel florian.leng...@gmail.com writes:

 Why is there even any consideration of some committee if someone wants to
 mirror the Hackage site? Why not mirror the site?

+1

  Alright, Mr. Wiseguy, she said, if you're so clever, you tell us
  what colour it should be. 

We can either let Dan set up a mirror, and add it to the haskell.org DNS
(or just let it live at a different address), and have a mirror up in a
couple of hours -- or we can set up 501(c)(3)s (whatever they are),
decide on a payment service, write bylaws, hire lawyers etc.  All in the
name of not-dealing-with-this-shit¹?

In my experience, everything is a lot simpler if you can avoid dealing
directly with money.  The current problem is that hackage has sometimes
been unstable, having a mirror would fix or at least alleviate that.

-k

¹  As argued in the cited Reddit thread. Okay, in all fairness, the
shit being referred to is the current non-redundant DNS configuration,
not people volunteering to solve technical issues. :-)
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-05 Thread Brandon S Allbery KF8NH
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
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On 12/5/10 02:41 , Florian Lengyel wrote:
 Why is there even any consideration of some committee if someone wants to
 mirror the Hackage site? Why not mirror the site?

Because it would be nice to have a mirror run by someone (a) accountable (b)
who is unlikely to suddenly disappear due to loss of job, life becoming
hectic, etc.  (Consider that this is pretty much why *.haskell.org has been
unreliable and fixes have been slow in coming; the individual in question is
at Yale, and a good person but kinda snowed under of late.)

- -- 
brandon s. allbery [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl]  allb...@kf8nh.com
system administrator  [openafs,heimdal,too many hats]  allb...@ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university  KF8NH
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-05 Thread wren ng thornton

On 12/5/10 11:23 AM, Ketil Malde wrote:

Florian Lengyelflorian.leng...@gmail.com  writes:


Why is there even any consideration of some committee if someone wants to
mirror the Hackage site? Why not mirror the site?


+1

   Alright, Mr. Wiseguy, she said, if you're so clever, you tell us
   what colour it should be.

We can either let Dan set up a mirror, and add it to the haskell.org DNS
(or just let it live at a different address), and have a mirror up in a
couple of hours -- or we can set up 501(c)(3)s (whatever they are),
decide on a payment service, write bylaws, hire lawyers etc.  All in the
name of not-dealing-with-this-shit¹?


Or? There's no need to be exclusive. Fact is that haskell.org has some 
money and needs to deal with that, so incorporating is just a matter of 
time. But that doesn't preclude folks setting up mirrors or doing 
anything non-money related. All one needs to do is convince the DNS 
owners to add your IP# to their entry.


501(c)(3) is the legal term for a class of US organizations more 
typically known as non-profit organizations. By incorporating as a 
501(c)(3) you get the benefits and responsibilities of being a 
government-recognized organization (e.g., rights to use a company name 
and prevent others from using it, certain kinds of indemnification 
against legal action, ability to act as a legal entity in other ways, 
rights to collect money, responsibility to pay taxes,...)


--
Live well,
~wren

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-05 Thread Vincent Hanquez

 I would really like mirrors too.

But before that happens it would be nice to have signed packages on 
Hackage, preventing

a mirror to distribute compromised stuff (intentionally or unintentionally).

--
Vincent

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-04 Thread Jake McArthur
I am no decision maker regarding Hackage, but I would like to echo my 
support for this offer. Hackage is a vital part of my workflow, and I'm 
sure I'm not the only one. Its importance to the Haskell community has 
grown quickly and is continuing to do so. Each time it goes down, the 
impact is larger than before. We should have a mirror in place for 
situations like these.


- Jake

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-04 Thread Ozgur Akgun
This is a very generous offer. However, I must say I like the following idea
more:

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/efw38/reminder_hackagehaskellorg_outage_tomorrow_due_to/c17u7nk

On 4 December 2010 16:31, Dan Knapp dan...@gmail.com wrote:

 With Hackage down, now seemed like a good time to push this issue
 again.  It's such an important site to us that it's really rather a
 shame there are no mirrors of it.  I have a personal-and-business
 server in a data center in Newark, with a fair chunk of bandwidth,
 which I'd like to offer for a permanent mirror.  Is there interest in
 this?  Who do I need to talk to for it to happen?

 Strategy-wise, I think the best approach is round-robin DNS, since
 that's transparent to the end user - everything would still appear at
 the URL it's at now, but behind-the-scenes magic would let things keep
 working when one or the other site is down.  I haven't personally set
 up such a system before but I'm willing to take on the burden of
 figuring it out.

 So I have a better idea of what I'm signing up for, can anyone tell me
 how much disk space and how much bandwidth per month Hackage uses?  I
 have a fair chunk of both, as I say, but I'd like to know in advance
 to ensure that things go smoothly.

 As for what I'd want in return for this, really nothing.  I wouldn't
 say no to an unobtrusive mention somewhere on the site, but I'd be
 happy just knowing I'd given something back to the Haskell community,
 which has given a lot to me.

 --
 Dan Knapp
 An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to
 be devoured. (Konrad Adenauer)

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-- 
Ozgur Akgun
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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-04 Thread Riad S. Wahby
Ozgur Akgun ozgurak...@gmail.com wrote:
 This is a very generous offer. However, I must say I like the following idea
 more:
 
 http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/efw38/
 reminder_hackagehaskellorg_outage_tomorrow_due_to/c17u7nk

I'd support this, but I'm strongly in favor of the use of WePay.com over
PayPal for collecting funds. The former's shady history is a matter of
public record.

Alternatively, I'd also be willing to throw some of my own bandwidth and
disk space towards a mirror.

-=rsw

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-04 Thread wren ng thornton

On 12/4/10 11:31 AM, Dan Knapp wrote:

With Hackage down, now seemed like a good time to push this issue
again.  It's such an important site to us that it's really rather a
shame there are no mirrors of it.  I have a personal-and-business
server in a data center in Newark, with a fair chunk of bandwidth,
which I'd like to offer for a permanent mirror.

Is there interest in this?


Absolutely.


Who do I need to talk to for it to happen?


I'd guess that'd be the haskell.org steering committee:


http://haskellorg.wordpress.com/2010/11/15/the-haskell-org-committee-has-formed/

--
Live well,
~wren

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-04 Thread wren ng thornton

On 12/4/10 2:21 PM, Riad S. Wahby wrote:

Ozgur Akgunozgurak...@gmail.com  wrote:

This is a very generous offer. However, I must say I like the following idea
more:

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/efw38/
reminder_hackagehaskellorg_outage_tomorrow_due_to/c17u7nk


That sounds like a great idea.

The 501(c)(3) I mean. The distributed hosting is nice too, though I'd 
like to see the 501(c)(3) formed before donating, just so we can get 
official reports and all that. But once that's up, I'm definitely 
willing to contribute.


FWIW, I've been on the board of directors for a 501(c)(3), helped write 
their bylaws, and know a few people in the business (lawyers, etc). I'm 
willing to offer advice, effort, and references whenever the committee 
decides to do this.





I'd support this, but I'm strongly in favor of the use of WePay.com over
PayPal for collecting funds. The former's shady history is a matter of
public record.


Semantic Parse Fail: did you mean the latter or strongly opposed to?



Alternatively, I'd also be willing to throw some of my own bandwidth and
disk space towards a mirror.


For a scalable solution I think we should be aiming for both (1) a 
distributed central server, and (2) mirrors around the globe. The 
former gives reliability to the main site, but the latter help for 
locality and loadbalancing as well as failover.


--
Live well,
~wren

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-04 Thread Riad S. Wahby
wren ng thornton w...@freegeek.org wrote:
 Semantic Parse Fail: did you mean the latter or strongly opposed to?

s/former/latter/

:)

-=rsw

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

2010-12-04 Thread Florian Lengyel
Why is there even any consideration of some committee if someone wants to
mirror the Hackage site? Why not mirror the site?
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