I can imagine $8000 in SSDs having a major impact on the build farm. And that in turn could draw in even more obs users/contributors.

Greg

+1 I don't know if there's issues around legality of purchasing hardware (without the foundation in place to handle funds) but infrastructure supporting the OBS seems like a sound investment to me. Improving build times would directly help the many projects using the OBS. The alternative of contributing to one of the major Free Software groups mentioned, who are actively supporting and producing quality work, would also be satisfactory. Anything that offers some small benefit in return, in the form of publicity or other (personnel bugsquashing for a day?) would be nice of course, but there needn't be strings attached. Helen -- IRC: helen_au helen.south@opensuse.org helensouth.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

On 2011-05-04 22:41:59 (+0530), Sankar P wrote:

On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 4:30 PM, Greg Freemyer wrote:

...

Is there a company/sponsor that if we sent them the money would agree to buy SSDs for the build farm? I can imagine $8000 in SSDs having a major impact on the build farm. And that in turn could draw in even more obs users/contributors.

I am so impressed by this idea that I have a crazy thought.

Can we have a "Buy SSDs for OBS" fundraiser as part of the next openSUSE conference ? I am not sure if it is a common thing to collect money during a technical conference but I have seen such fundraisers work magic for some of the non-profit organizations in my part of the world.

People who attend the conference can donate whatever they can. Assuming an attendance of about 500 people, 10 EUR from each will give a good number. Can we have this as part of the openSUSE conference ?

Sounds like a good idea, indeed. But without a foundation, who would collect the monies ? Where would they be deposited ? Can we even donate money to Attachmate ? Is that even feasible for their accounting, and legal requirements ? I wouldn't be so sure. I mean, it's one of the main reasons for having an openSUSE foundation (at least in terms of short term goals): we cannot give money to Novell (or Attachmate, for that matter) and request that money to be used exclusively to sponsor certain things in openSUSE. At least it wasn't an option with Novell. But hey, if someone wants to "pay me back" on the way more than 1000 EUR I've put on renting opensu.se over the past years... feel free ;D (yeah I know, I'm repeating myself) (Would be better if 4-5 more people would join in on sponsoring that, it's a monthly fee of 100€ and if we can divide that through a larger number of people... you get the point.) cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf

On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 05:00, Greg Freemyer wrote:

Apologies for the top post.

Is there a company/sponsor that if we sent them the money would agree to buy SSDs for the build farm?

I can imagine $8000 in SSDs having a major impact on the build farm. And that in turn could draw in even more obs users/contributors.

Greg

The only issue that I have with this is that OBS would probably not benefit from SSDs. We were having this discussion on a different oS ML. SSDs do really poorly at writing data to the disk. Its very likely that we wouldn't gain much from buying a bunch of SSDs. Keeping this suggestion in mind it might be good to ask adrain, coolo, darix, or someone in that area what they could really benefit from right now. Cheers, Stephen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

Am Mittwoch, 4. Mai 2011, 20:30:18 schrieb jdd:

Le 04/05/2011 20:12, Stephen Shaw a écrit :

...

Keeping this suggestion in mind it might be good to ask adrain, coolo, darix, or someone in that area what they could really benefit from right now.

bunch of ram?? This is what we seriously considered already indeed.

Greetings, Stephan -- Sent from openSUSE -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 4:26 AM, Adrian Schröter wrote:

Am Mittwoch, 4. Mai 2011, 20:56:54 schrieb Stephan Kulow:

...

Am Mittwoch, 4. Mai 2011, 20:30:18 schrieb jdd:

...

Le 04/05/2011 20:12, Stephen Shaw a écrit :

...

Keeping this suggestion in mind it might be good to ask adrain, coolo, darix, or someone in that area what they could really benefit from right now.

bunch of ram?? This is what we seriously considered already indeed.

Yep, ram makes more sense then a SSD.

SSD are either slow on write (what we do heavily) or they seem not to be reliable enough as far as I heard from other OBS installations tried to use them.

memory will decrease the need of writing data to any disk at all and in best case (small packages) the build can happen entirely in memory.

moin adrian

There is a lot of variety in SSD quality. I hope your comments reflect lower end units, but I don't know. I definitely believe the write-speed of high-end units far exceeds the write speed of rotating disks. I personally haven't put a high-end SSD into a server yet, so I don't know about reliability. fyi: How does RAM for a high-end server compare price wise to high-end SSD for the same server? How about capacity limitations of the servers. Adding SSD, I expect to be easy. Adding 256GB or ram, I don't know about. Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

On Wed, 4 May 2011 12:06:45 -0700, Greg KH wrote:

Getting some more big multi-processor servers would help out OBS a lot, but I think that $8000 isn't going to help us much there :(

I wonder how hard it would be to create a distributed system where random people could temporarily donate CPU resources. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

On 2011-05-04 22:00:56 (+0200), Marcus Meissner wrote:

On Wed, May 04, 2011 at 07:46:37PM +0000, Trifle Menot wrote:

...

On Wed, 4 May 2011 12:06:45 -0700, Greg KH wrote:

...

Getting some more big multi-processor servers would help out OBS a lot, but I think that $8000 isn't going to help us much there :(

I wonder how hard it would be to create a distributed system where random people could temporarily donate CPU resources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects

How would you confirm that they are not malicious?

Exactly, that's a *HUGE* trust problem. Someone with root or physical (hence root) access to a build server can inject malicious code into the resulting packages. So we can only use trusted hosts from trusted parties. For build.o.o, it's all hosted by Novell, but for Packman that issue is even more critical as we rely on a few people providing us build hardware. -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf

On 2011-05-04 12:06:45 (-0700), Greg KH wrote:

On Wed, May 04, 2011 at 12:12:59PM -0600, Stephen Shaw wrote: [...]

...

Its very likely that we wouldn't gain much from buying a bunch of SSDs.

Now that is true, as it doesn't seem like we are I/O bound, but CPU bound for the most part.

Actually, from our experience on the Packman OBS, it is extremely I/O bound. Except for a few mad packages that take ages to compile, setting up the build chroot is the major bottleneck. We resorted to using 2 worker processes at most on the build hosts because with more than that, the boxes are just idle waiting on I/O to happen (which eventually slows down the absolute build time). cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf

On 05/05/11 00:59, Pascal Bleser wrote:

[...] Or sponsor a server for Packman ? [...]

What kind of hardware specs are we talking about in this context? Thomas -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

On 2011-05-15 11:48:51 (+0100), Thomas Hertweck wrote:

On 05/05/11 19:46, Thomas Hertweck wrote:

...

On 05/05/11 00:59, Pascal Bleser wrote:

...

[...] Or sponsor a server for Packman ? [...]

What kind of hardware specs are we talking about in this context?

A couple of months ago, I have pointed out that I might be able to donate some (used) hardware - you will find such a message in the archive (although the context was different and not primarily about hardware). Here I have again asked what hardware specs you are looking for.

Sorry, I missed that one. For Packman, we would actually need bandwidth too, as we don't have any means to host them either, and an OBS worker host does use up quite some bandwith (they're in a VPN with our main instance). Hence in terms of sponsoring, for Packman, we would be primarily interested in monetary donations in order to rent a hosted server, including bandwidth.

In both cases, I haven't received *any* reply. We have therefore now given some servers to another project, people there were actually quite keen on getting the hardware and they were very thankful for the support.

Okay, sorry again, but good for the other project then :)

I find this a bit disappointing, to be honest. But if nobody on this mailing list responds to inquiries or questions, I can't do anything about it. The question I posed was simple enough. Okay, it would have been used hardware and no new hardware. But it would have been for free.

Yes, that's awesome, and thanks a lot for your offer.

We may have other opportunities in the future, but I don't know when this will be, it depends on the next round of server and cluster updates. Hardware specs in the current case was rack-mounted dual-CPU quad-core Intel Xeon 2.9GHz, 96GB RAM, 15k rpm RAID. Not sure whether this would have been suitable for your purpose but the servers have certainly served us well.

A server with specs like that would be awesome indeed, and very well suited for being an OBS worker host. As I explained above, though, the issue is that we also need the bandwidth :\ But thanks for your kind offer nevertheless, and sorry for having missed out on it on the list. cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf

On 2011-05-20 18:25:06 (+0100), Thomas Hertweck wrote:

Pascal and others,

On 20/05/11 06:50, Pascal Bleser wrote:

...

[...] Hence in terms of sponsoring, for Packman, we would be primarily interested in monetary donations in order to rent a hosted server, including bandwidth. [...] for a company is able to see your request somewhere. Replies to your request won't be guaranteed but I think that's okay when we consider it will only take you 5min to draft such a small email/article. It's very rare that a company approaches a project directly to inquire how the company could help, it's more likely that a company responds should there be a request for help.

Sure, could happen. An additional difficulty, though, is that OBS worker hosts need to be ultimately trusted, because anyone with root access can inject evil stuff into the packages, without anyone noticing (checksums don't help either, as it can be injected into the binary packages, before a checksum is computed on them). So not only do we need * servers * bandwidth but we also need them to be in the hands of people we know and trust. cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf

On 2011-05-05 21:33:11 (+0200), Ismail Doenmez wrote:

Am Thu 05 May 2011 01:59:14 AM CEST schrieb Pascal Bleser :

...

On 2011-05-03 07:00:14 (-0400), Greg Freemyer wrote:

...

Is there a company/sponsor that if we sent them the money would agree to buy SSDs for the build farm?

I can imagine $8000 in SSDs having a major impact on the build farm. And that in turn could draw in even more obs users/contributors.

Yes, true.

Or sponsor a server for Packman ?

This is a very good idea actually, we should seriously consider it.

Yes but no, I don't know ... Packman is not an organization either, hence we still need a recipient for the sponsoring from Google, that would then redistribute. cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf

On 2011-05-09 09:30:16 (+0200), Adrian Schröter wrote:

Am Donnerstag, 5. Mai 2011, 01:59:14 schrieb Pascal Bleser:

...

On 2011-05-03 07:00:14 (-0400), Greg Freemyer wrote:

...

Apologies for the top post.

Is there a company/sponsor that if we sent them the money would agree to buy SSDs for the build farm?

I can imagine $8000 in SSDs having a major impact on the build farm. And that in turn could draw in even more obs users/contributors.

Yes, true.

Or sponsor a server for Packman ?

actually, I support this suggestion very much.

The same money may make a bigger difference there then on build.o.o.

Most probably, yes. But the more I think of it... The current situation is as follows: * we have one server of our own, which has been kindly donated by Lejo's (Leo Eraly) employer, The Network Factory, a belgian company that sells consultancy and solutions based on Novell, SLE and openSUSE (and who said that the work of the Packman team did help them in quite a few offerings); * the bandwidth for that server is sponsored by Benesol, a belgian hosting company where I had a contact some years ago but not today any more, which means that the current sponsoring contract still holds, but I doubt I could request more servers to be hosted for free there in the future; * Marc Schiffbauer (who isn't even an openSUSE user ;)) sponsors most of the infrastructure (the website, the database server, the main FTP/rsync server) and finances part or most of that through the Google Ads on the Packman website (on a side note, huge kudos to Marc without whom none of this would exist). We also have a few more medium sized servers as build hosts, thanks to two people who might prefer to remain unknown (if not, please speak up, you deserve the kudos too :)) but whom we trust, including the bandwidth. So for what we do build and maintain right now, we're pretty fine, stuff builds quickly. But if the community also wants us to support more packages (than what we have in Essentials) for e.g. Factory, SLE11, Tumbleweed or Evergreen_*, then we would most probably need a bit more hardware. That being said, the major limiting factor right now is *CONTRIBUTORS*. As in "people". Detlef (Reichelt) and I are doing ~90% of the work and there are quite a lot of really nasty packages in there (the gstreamer stack just to name one of them). We're not alone, there are a few more warriors on the team, but we're all at the maximum capacity of what our free time permits (and way beyond actually, at the very least for Detlef and I). Right now, we have 714 (OBS) packages to maintain, and we haven't even migrated everything from our old repository. Tthe 11.4 repository now amounts to 5.6 GB, although that includes 32bit + 64bit, as well as debug and source packages + the repository metadata). So, if (preferrably at least somewhat experienced) packagers want to join the effort and help us, please please join the club. A few have done so already, but are maintaining only a few packages, which means we need a lot more people aboard. We're using an OBS instance, which means that if you're already used to working with build.opensuse.org, it's exactly the same thing.

...

Or sponsor opensu.se, a host a few of us have been paying many bucks for out of our own pocket since a few years ? (hosts the community wiki, will host webpin2, hosts planet.opensuse.org)

Hm, is there any reason why can't move webpin2 and planet.opensuse.org to some SUSE.com system ? I mean would that help you financial wise ?

The reason for webpin2 to be hosted there (once it's finished) is that it will also index packages from Packman. And as the German law regarding linking to that sort of stuff is still a bit unclear..... well, you know the story. Not sure it still applies today or whether legal is still as frigid though. Planet.o.o is there more for historical reasons. James used to host it on his own but it started to use way too much bandwidth for the contract he had, and darix and I provided him with a quick solution to move somewhere else. As James didn't have enough time to maintain it any more, I took over and migrated our planet to another piece of (heavily patched) software in the process. But, sure, planet.o.o could most probably be hosted on SUSE infrastructure. At least from a legal perspective, I don't see why it couldn't (but IANAL). That being said, all in all, I would very much like to retain some infrastructure options outside of SUSE. Once we'll have a foundation and funds, we'll be able to have a few such options without people having to pay it out of their own pocket (as it is right now). cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf

...

...

On 5/9/2011 at 11:05 AM, in message <201105091905.58256.jospoortvliet@gmail.com>, Jos Poortvliet wrote: On Monday 09 May 2011 11:27:10 Vincent Untz wrote: Le mardi 03 mai 2011, à 12:04 +0200, Vincent Untz a écrit : Now, it's not too late to change the plan. If you have a better suggestion, please tell us. There's no need to argue forever about it, just explain why you think it's good. Keep in mind that if we cannot receive the money ourselves, this also means that we cannot use it to buy stuff for openSUSE.

Thanks for all the contributions to this discussion. There are a few things that were probably badly explained in my original mail but clear in my mind, and they might be useful for everyone who has suggestions:

The main issue is "to which bank account should the money be sent?". There are several options:

- a not-for-profit organization related to openSUSE. Then, the money can be used for hardware like suggested in this thread, or for other activities.

- a not-for-profit organization not related to openSUSE. In this case, this would be a donation on behalf of the openSUSE project. I don't think we can reasonably ask most organizations to keep the money for us, especially as it might be a difficult task to handle from an accounting perspective. (Except for a few orgs who do that kind of job, like SPI or SFC, but that requires some paperwork and I'm not sure we want to do that and then create two months later a Foundation)

- a for-profit organization (most likely a company). If a company promises to use the money the way we want, for instance. It's worth pointing out that we will have no guarantee that the money will be used the way we want, and I'm unsure how well this works with Google, but we can check.

All, Working with the SUSE accounts, I have figured out a way that we can collect this money and process it through SUSE as long as we apply it to openSUSE project expenses directly. In other words, use it to pay for SDDs for OBS etc. Much harder if we tried to save the money towards some future expense. With this and pascal's request you have some good options to support OBS and/or other areas of the openSUSE project. regards, Alan Clark

...

- an individual. There are tax concerns for the person, and it puts some risk/pressure on her/him. I'd prefer to avoid that if possible.

I hope that helps clarify the background of the discussion.

Considering many seem to love the suggestion of supporting OBS somehow and Pacman might be a particularly 'needy' cause, the obvious question now is - Pascal, is there any way we can help Pacman within the above constraints?

You already mentioned there is no organization behind it which complicates it. But maybe you know a 'friendly' not-for-profit which can help us, or someone associated with Pacman does have a company which could help?

(if it wasn't obvious I support Adrian and Ismael in their enthusiasm for Pascal's request)

...

Cheers,

Vincent

-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 10:33 AM, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

On 2011-05-09 Alan wrote:

...

...

...

...

On 5/9/2011 at 11:05 AM, in message

<201105091905.58256.jospoortvliet@gmail.com>, Jos Poortvliet

wrote:

...

On Monday 09 May 2011 11:27:10 Vincent Untz wrote:

...

Le mardi 03 mai 2011, à 12:04 +0200, Vincent Untz a écrit :

...

Now, it's not too late to change the plan. If you have a better suggestion, please tell us. There's no need to argue forever about it, just explain why you think it's good. Keep in mind that if we cannot receive the money ourselves, this also means that we cannot use it to buy stuff for openSUSE.

Thanks for all the contributions to this discussion. There are a few things that were probably badly explained in my original mail but clear in my mind, and they might be useful for everyone who has suggestions:

The main issue is "to which bank account should the money be sent?".

There are several options:   - a not-for-profit organization related to openSUSE. Then, the   money

    can be used for hardware like suggested in this thread, or for     other activities.

  - a not-for-profit organization not related to openSUSE. In this

    case, this would be a donation on behalf of the openSUSE     project. I don't think we can reasonably ask most     organizations to keep the money for us, especially as it     might be a difficult task to handle from an accounting     perspective.     (Except for a few orgs who do that kind of job, like SPI or     SFC, but that requires some paperwork and I'm not sure we     want to do that and then create two months later a     Foundation)

  - a for-profit organization (most likely a company). If a   company

    promises to use the money the way we want, for instance. It's     worth pointing out that we will have no guarantee that the     money will be used the way we want, and I'm unsure how well     this works with Google, but we can check.

All,

Working with the SUSE accounts, I have figured out a way that we can collect this money and process it through SUSE as long as we apply it to openSUSE project expenses directly.  In other words, use it to pay for SDDs for OBS etc.  Much harder if we tried to save the money towards some future expense.

With this and pascal's request you have some good options to support OBS and/or other areas of the openSUSE project.

Points for you, Alan. I wonder - does this help the case where Pascal and his team don't have a good way to receive the money? In other words, can we buy some hardware for them from the GSOC monies?

I think Alan's email was clear enough that we can buy equipment and it is a very short step from buying SSDs to run in OBS to buying a server to run Packman on. For this to proceed, someone needs to accept the reponsibility of: 1) Putting together a real proposal for purchasing SSDs for OBS complete with some technical info about why we think that will improve performance in the specific situation of the SSD. 2) Similar for a Packman server. Then put the proposals up and have a members only vote. (I do think this should be members only.) Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

Le mercredi 11 mai 2011, à 09:24 +0200, Andreas Jaeger a écrit :

On Tuesday, May 10, 2011 01:39:49 AM Alan Clark wrote:

...

Working with the SUSE accounts, I have figured out a way that we can collect this money and process it through SUSE as long as we apply it to openSUSE project expenses directly. In other words, use it to pay for SDDs for OBS etc. Much harder if we tried to save the money towards some future expense.

With this and pascal's request you have some good options to support OBS and/or other areas of the openSUSE project.

Thanks a lot Alan!

Here's one more idea: use the money to sponsor our mentors to come to the openSUSE conference...

I'm not sure it would work accounting-wise, with what Alan said: - the openSUSE conference is in September, so we'd need to spend the money at that time - we won't receive the money before October Alan, would that work? Cheers, Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org