I don't know if this has been brought up before, but I thought I'd throw it out there for discussion...
I have been thinking about the idea of contacting additional groups, schools, hosting providers, etc regarding the idea of offering us additional server space. For example, what if we (by "we" I mean the board) contacted Linode and asked what they might be willing to donate to the Foundation. Even a small VM with Linode could mirror services, and allow for some improved redundancy. It seems we've been limited to three providers (I don't know the reasons or history behind each), but adding more offers us a lot of options. Below are a bunch of benefits that I see, in no particular order: donated VPS space saves the foundation money VPS companies benefit from good PR by donating to the Foundation (plus a tax write-off) most VPS providers offer out of band console access, which is something we don't have now geographic diversity of services / mirrors dozens (hundreds?) of schools and organizations mirror for distributions, why not GNOME? (I don't just mean FTP) round-robin DNS for mirroring (most of our sites would be easy to mirror this way) even short-term donations are beneficial for development environments, etc. Even if the provider doesn't offer us a full VM, donated mirrored web space would be nice. Again, distributed mirroring allows us to run maintenance on our core transparently while the mirrors handle the traffic. I realize mirroring our sites and services is a little further down the road, but this is a step toward that. I really am concerned about some of our single points of failure, and I very much like the idea of spreading out the load. I don't know the full accuracy of this claim, but a Fedora contributor offered to me that their expected downtime would be 4-6hrs should Red Hat decide to pull the plug on the Fedora infrastructure. Consider the same situation for the GNOME Foundation. I can't even imagine how much trouble we'd be in. I'd like to put together a list for the board of providers we might contact and the main benefits each would provide. If anyone has any suggestions, please get the conversation going. Christer _______________________________________________ gnome-infrastructure mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-infrastructure
