Date: Wed, 06 Dec 1995 04:55:20 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: hackers@freebsd.org Cc: announce@freebsd.org Subject: Second appeal for sup, CTM, mail and www servers. Please help! Message-ID: <19165.818254520@time.cdrom.com>
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First the good news: We've decided, after much internal debate, to re-open general read access to the CVS repository. Yes, you heard that correctly - no more access lists for getting at the CVS bits, we're opening the doors. Not only will we open the doors, in fact, but we will also probably deploy a few extra services for getting at this information in various interesting ways, including the clever little "check out over anon FTP" feature that OpenBSD is using and probably a few other WWW based search/diff tools as well (contributions welcome here, BTW). Now the bad news: We don't have the resources to actually deploy any of these services from freefall.freebsd.org. We're truly maxed out here folks. Not only is our poor machine handling almost hallucinogenic amounts of mail these days, but it is also dealing with the load of many thousands of web hits, 10 sup clients pounding it almost continuously and a CTM delta generation job from hell that causes the lights in the machine room to dim noticeably whenever it runs. Now if this machine were just sitting in a corner beating its brains out, nobody would actually even care. Unfortunately, it's instead supposed to be our main development box, an as such is used by many interactive users. When CVS operations and such are slow on it, all FreeBSD development is adversely impacted. Therefore, in order to continue to offer even the existing level of services, we are simply going to have to start looking at how to offload some of this stuff from our machine. We can't go on like this and still offer any kind of reasonable service to our users. What we most desperately need are sup servers who can provide: a) At least 300-400MB of free space. b) A reasonably fast (and uncongested) internet connection c) Connectivity for *at least* 20 sup clients. That last clause is actually important only if you will be supping directly from freefall. Since it would obviously defeat the purpose to see freefall sink under the load of dozens of mirrors, we'd like to limit the number of direct mirrors to 6 sites. This will allow us to service the mirrors and the core team directly from freefall without going beyond our current limit of 10 (and hopefully not see them maxed out all the time!). If a sup server decides to export bits to some other sup server, that's fine just so long as they're well connected and won't end up with some server offering out-of-date bits to an unsuspecting user base. We'd also be happy if a site providing sup access for CVS could at least be NFS mountable (if not the same machine) for a WWW server which could, at some point, provide the same fancy lookup tools as provided on freefall.freebsd.org. Sits willing to do CTM delta generation as well would also probably be a big help, though you'll have to ask Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@freebsd.org> for more direct assistance in setting up such mirrors. If we could move the CTM delta generation off of freefall entirely at some point then that would be another big load reduction. Please don't misunderstand me: This is a fairly big committment, and it would not be honest of me if I failed to point out that sup and CTM services WILL impose a significant overhead on any machine assigned to the task! I'm primarily looking for people at universities or ISPs who have the hardware and network bandwidth to spare, not someone for whom the service will quickly become a significant hardship. Again, we're very close to being able to make the CVS repository available for generally access again, but we just can't do it from freefall. We don't have the resources! Thanks very much in advance to anyone willing to help us out here.. Jordan
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