Date: Wed, 06 Dec 1995 20:39:19 +0200 From: Mark Murray <mark@grondar.za> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org, announce@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Second appeal for sup, CTM, mail and www servers. Please help! Message-ID: <199512061839.UAA08521@grumble.grondar.za>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> 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. Yaay! > 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). Yaay! > We don't have the resources to actually deploy any of these services > from freefall.freebsd.org. I can help here. > 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. I have offered to do this on ftp.internat.freebsd.org and volunteer it again. I have a volunteer with a "well-connected" machine who can remail this for me. I suspect, though, that I will need more remailers to make this work properly. More volunteers? (Preferably representing a country/region). The problem is internat.freebsd.org does not have the bandwidth to mega-mail the world! > 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. See above. ftp.internat.freebsd.org is your friend :-). The machine is modest by your standards, (50MHZ 486 w/ 16MB RAM) but is idle 99% of the time. > 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. 2GB? I've got it! > b) A reasonably fast (and uncongested) internet connection Through proxy remailers and ftp mirrors, should be OK. > c) Connectivity for *at least* 20 sup clients. Er, help?! The "well-connected" site I ewas referring to may be able to help here, but the line latency to ZA plays hell with SUP. Brings out the worst in it. Any chances of doing some kind of FSP mirroring? > 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. Oh, right! I could probably take over ZA, and serve all of _that_ with not too much of a problem!! :-) > 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. Hmm... I'll look around... > 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. I can do these. I am already doing these for the international crypto code. Remailers would be a massive help. > 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. I am a nework engineer for an ISP, and I have contacts at a couple of sites, including a univerity or two. I'll ask around for those that I have not already offered. > 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! Count me in! > Thanks very much in advance to anyone willing to help us out here.. :-) :-) :-) M -- Mark Murray 46 Harvey Rd, Claremont, Cape Town 7700, South Africa +27 21 61-3768 GMT+0200 Finger mark@grumble.grondar.za for PGP key
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199512061839.UAA08521>