Non-Profit Colocation?

dew asks: "I've just put together what might be the world's first non-profit focused on providing colocated Internet access for individuals, non-profits, and Open Source groups. We're called the California Community Colocation Project and we're part of a 501c3. We do not host any for-profit endeavors, personal or commercial. We've just opened our Palo Alto facilities and have multiple fiber drops to PAIX, where our upstream provider is heavily peered. I started this project to be as useful as possible to the non-profit and Open Source worlds: how would you best recommend I do that? Compile farms? A SourceForge mirror in case they go down?"

Comments

Re:are they for real or just a bad pun?

[UnifiedTechs]

Pardon me for what may seem like a troll post, but I cannot help wonder if these site/org is for real.
They call themselves CCCP ... a pun intended or an early April fools joke?

And their web site [communitycolo.net]: Red background with Yellow letters. If not a visual pun, it shows poor color choice in terms of readability. If their web site is poorly designed, what else is in questionable shape?

I can assure you it's real, I have been talking to dew and I am about to move a box into the facility, Also I have told him I am available for volunteer work.

When I first saw the site a month ago I was looking for a place for me and a few friends to place some boxes, all the regular colo's wanted upwards of $800-1000 dollars a month, but not being a buisness there was no way we could afford it.

To me this is a wonderful idea, it will allow normal people and non-profit companies a place to host sites and services for a much more reasonable price. (Free, donations sugested) I am looking forward to the day I am ready to move my boxes in and all the fun and experiance I can get volunteering.

If you think the site is designed that bad I'm sure dew would be more then happy if you offered to design him a better one. Remember this is a 100% non-profit and I know dew is spending alot of his personal money to get it moving, so of course hiring a firm to design the page is out of the question. I would do it but one look at my site would tell you I'm no pro myself.

I hope this idea takes off and communities all over the US (and the World) will soon have a place to co-locate for cheap.

mirror ISOs with more reasonable bandwidth limits

[benjamindees]

I would say that the best contribution to the linux community that you could make, assuming that you have the bandwidth, is to mirror distributions in ISO format like www.linuxiso.org does.

I have had nothing but trouble trying to download ISO images due to several problems that higher server bandwidth would have certainly fixed.

eg. Some servers require HTTP downloads, including www.linuxiso.org (??). Downloading a huge file for days at a time in Windows is just asking for an error. Also, the RedHat server always "resets" my FTP connections in the middle of the night. And, most FTP servers have bandwidth restrictions, even during off-peak times, that are not dependent upon the server load.

I would guess that load on these types of servers would be greatly reduced if people could download what they need quickly, without having to abort downloads and restart from scratch.