[Libre-soc-dev] Libre-soc-dev Digest, Vol 40, Issue 9

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Thursday, September 21, 2023, Sable via Libre-soc-dev <
libre-soc-dev at lists.libre-soc.org> wrote:

>
>>
>> I wouldn't be concerned with being a micro-manager, hated or otherwise,
> as I am sure you have justification for doing so.  All that just means is
> you take your work seriously and you have ethical standards.
>

ethical standards, due diligence (that people don't know had been done),
25 years experience with different types of hosting, and taking the
responsibility for a project of this importance seriously, yes.


>
> Just my two cents.


appreciated, Sable.  indeed there is a reason, the Virtual Machine (XEN VM)
is with mythic-beasts.com who are a sponsor of the project. they
provide 100% guaranteed VM configuration: no "ballooning" of either
CPU, Memory or Network.

(uptime as of today: 772 days)

other VM Hosters typically say "only EUR 3.99! per month! for 4GB RAM! and
1GBit networking! and 4 3Ghz cores!" but what they don't say is, "the VM is
on
hardware with only 128 GB of actual RAM, only 48 actual cores, shared
with 1,000 other customers, and we have 100,000 customers but our
ISP Peering Agreement only has a maximum total 10 GBit capacity".

so your $3.99 VM during any peak load (due to any of the other 999
customers on the same hardware) actually gets smashed down to
0.5 GB RAM, sending all your critical services into swap-space thrashing,
but that's ok because the network load is also so high due to the other 999
customers on that 10 Gbit/s shared network means your network capacity
is reduced to 0.1Mbit/sec and the speed of the 4 ballooned "cores" is
dropped to around an average of 100 Mhz.

we certainly cannot use personal machines for running such critical service.

[the CI is non-critical, so jacob runs it on a personal machine, after he
got
net-abuse warnings for setting the CI on debian's sponsored gitlab servers
much too high. this does now have the advantage that he can connect a
Digilent Arty A7-100t directly to it, for doing CI FPGA builds]

paying for Co-Lo hosting (for your own server) is EXPENSIVE (most of
the cost in Co-Lo hosting is electricity).

leasing a server is also expensive (again, electricity)

finding "guaranteed VM provisioning Hosting" is extremely challenging,
as they typically charge 5x as much money because that's just what it costs
when you don't offer "ballooned" VMs like most Hosting companies do.

therefore we have to be extremely careful about what goes onto that
VM, and not squander its resources by hammering its precious CPU, Memory
or Network allocation with unnecessary usage or services.

i have had to set fail2ban to be extremely strict after the logs showed
multi-month-long persistent efforts from Mafia and State-Sponsored hacking
on OpenVPN, ssh and exim4 (the OpenVPN attacks were North Korea,
a couple years back, iirc correctly).

i have already had to negotiate an increase in VM RAM CPU and Disk, a
couple of years ago. Mythic-Beasts loved the project enough to partly
sponsor its cost as a FOSSHW Project.

nobody seems to know any of this despite this being a 5 year project
and its entire development history being available online in IRC and
mailing list archives.

l.



-- 
---
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68