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Inside the Open Source Lab

FreeFooOpenFighter writes "KernelTrap has an interesting article about Oregon State University's Open Source Lab. They currently provide hosting for an impressive list of projects including, among many others, the Mozilla Foundation, Debian GNU/Linux, and Gentoo Linux. According to the informative article, they plan to continue to donate hosting with their two OC48s to FOSS projects meeting their criteria."

105 comments

  1. Re:GREAT STORY by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Haha. I noticed that when I started Firefox. Wasn't sure if it was something wrong with my net connection, so I went on slashdot to check (I knew you'd all go nuts if it went down for more than a minute).

  2. Re:Google.com Down by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Google was down for me.

    I live in Minnesota, has this happend everywhere or is it just localized ?

  3. Re:OMFG lol GOOGLE by SteelV · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Thanks for the post. I didn't realize you were a member of Slashdot, Mr. Gates.

  4. Re:Google.com Down by MoOsEb0y · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Holy shit! God^Hogle is down! I was wondering why my gmail notifier on firefox was blank. OMGWTFBBQLOL! Seriously though.. doesn't akamai handle their dynamic server redirection?

  5. Re:Google is back by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Not back for me

  6. Re:Google is back by MasterRa · · Score: 0

    It's still gone for me...

  7. On behalf of the Rest of the World by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful


    here are four (4) words that are never said enough to all the people involved in FOSS, they are free and no licence is required to say them:

    Thank You Very Much

    best wishes
    The Rest Of the World(TM)

    1. Re:On behalf of the Rest of the World by simcop2387 · · Score: 2, Funny

      you don't speak for me!!!!

      i always say,

      thank you double plus much!!

    2. Re:On behalf of the Rest of the World by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      On the same note, there are three words not said enough to Microsoft and its minions.

      To borrow from Dick Cheney,

      Go fuck yourself!

      Cheers, mate!

    3. Re:On behalf of the Rest of the World by Trizor · · Score: 1

      No, your new speak is wrong, its: double plus thanks to you

    4. Re:On behalf of the Rest of the World by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Catapultam mei major tuam est.

    5. Re:On behalf of the Rest of the World by birdowner · · Score: 1

      Very true, very absolutely true! The quality of software is absolutely gorgeous, and it is at a state where our machines are splendid tools. Thank you very much, indeed. You have all made a big difference in my life.

    6. Re:On behalf of the Rest of the World by moranar · · Score: 1

      FOSS _is_ done in The Rest Of The World. So thanks to us, I guess. This is something I really like about it (apart from the freedom, the openness, the penguins, the fugu fishes, the demons...): _everyone_ can do it, you don't have to live in the US. Hell, half of the KDE team at least is in Germany, and that's just off the top of my head.

      --
      "I think it would be a good idea!"
      Gandhi, about Internet Security
  8. Re:Google down - Rejected Story by ScytheBlade1 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I blame DNS. Seeing as you can still access it via IP, and the DNS doesn't enjoy resolving at the current point in time...

  9. What's a God Hogle? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Oh wait, it's lame UNIX faggotry

  10. Yes, thank you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    For substandard hobby software

    1. Re:Yes, thank you by smittyoneeach · · Score: 1

      Yes, Melinda, your hubby ships substandard software.

      --
      Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
  11. Re:Google.com Down by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    down in UK too

  12. google problems ISP specific? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I'm in Boston, and when I access through a Verizon DSL connection, it seems to be down. When I SSH to a university computer, google.com loads up fine in lynx.

    1. Re:google problems ISP specific? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      google.com pings just fine. www.google.com was made a CNAME pointing to www.l.google.com, which didn't exist as a host.

      The same problem is happening with Gmail right now. Even if the Google webservers are up and running, nobody can reach them because the DNS is returning a broken host reference.

    2. Re:google problems ISP specific? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My DNS hasn't updated in months, you insensitive clod!

  13. Re:Being ontopic.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sounds good, I'm in.

  14. Re:Being ontopic.. by casuist99 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's nice that the hosting is donated... does this give any advantages to Oregon State students? Ultra-fast downloads over the U's internal network connections, for example?

    Being closed to the public is probably going to happen with any "lab" at a university, but I'd bet that there are quite a few opportunities for student involvement with the lab if you know where to look.

  15. Re:Google is back by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No Google News.

  16. sf.net by stedo · · Score: 1

    SourceForge is open to the public, and kicks ass. What has this to offer that sf doesn't?

    1. Re:sf.net by keesh · · Score: 4, Informative

      Sourceforge couldn't even begin to handle a project as big as, say, the main Gentoo CVS tree. Gentoo alone has more hardware at OSL than all of sourceforge put together.

    2. Re:sf.net by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not to mention availability... SF's current cvs availability record is embarrasing. I had to switch my project over to Berlios because the uptime was so pathetic (and I now get to use SVN rather than CVS as an added bonus).

    3. Re:sf.net by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 1

      Whilst SF is an amazing site and do provide an impressive range of services, they do have their faults. The site is down surprisingly often and the mailing lists frequently suffer from huge delivery delays and message reordering.

      Don't get me wrong: what SF do is great and it's a non trivial task. But when we had sufficient resources, we moved over to our own systems where we had better control over such technical issues.

    4. Re:sf.net by Umbral+Blot · · Score: 1

      I love SF, except for its statistics system, which has been down for the majority of my project's life time. The new statistics system release has been delayed multiple time, kind like Longhorn.

    5. Re:sf.net by cshields2 · · Score: 1

      SourceForge does not offer hosting for dedicated servers (including those coming from the communities themselves that need hosting). We take a real hands-on approach as well. For example, a new 2-way mobo and procs are being shipped for one of Gentoo's AMD64 development boxes this coming week. Someone from the OSL will be available to perform the upgrade when it arrives. It is more of a server hosting environment than a managed project hosting environment.

      SourceForge is great.. Most OSS apps out there need just what SF provides, and SF has been very influential in the development of Open Source software. I don't think that we can compare OSL and SF across the board, they each fill a purpose that the other doesn't, and the OSL is not out to replace SF. I hope that the above helps to answer your question..

    6. Re:sf.net by hacker · · Score: 1

      SF.net, until recently, ran on 1 server and 1 backup. Now I think they have 4 front-line servers and 2 backup (total of 6).

      I'm sure many OSS projects have more hardware than SF.net (in fact I know the projects I host at SourceFubar.Net do).

      There's a difference between "Doing It", and "Doing it Right". SF.net is a case of the former.

    7. Re:sf.net by superpulpsicle · · Score: 1

      I agree to sticking with SF cause I got a huge problem with OpenSource being tied to schools. If you look at the credits for alot of the projects, the developers names should be the only thing on the list.

      I am almost offended when I see MIT, Stanford on a project list. It's not like a corporation that has a copyright lifespan. The school names never scrubs off, they last forever! When the developers are dead, the schools name is still associated with the code, project, credit....

    8. Re:sf.net by hacker · · Score: 3, Interesting
      "I agree to sticking with SF cause I got a huge problem with OpenSource being tied to schools."

      My only real beef in that regard, is that SF.net is not Open Source at all. Their code isn't Open Source, their formats are not Open Source, and they are wholly a 100% proprietary entity. They're just using the OSS community to get them visibility with corporate sponsors.

      One of my former colleagues used to work for them. When they released 1.0 of the proprietary SF.net codebase, all of the developers were immediately fired. It was like "Thanks for helping us reach this wonderful milestone. Now we can become profitable. You're all fired."

      You can't even download the last version of their OSS code and use it to run your own version of a version control hosting solution. If you wanted to migrate away from SF.net and export your projects, bugs, files, etc. you can't... because there's nothing else out there to import that data into. Its just like Microsoft documents... once you get your data in, you can't get it back out.

      That also doesn't take into account how many things they've crippled in the name of "security" there. Mailman (no mbox downloads, no search, no offline use of archives), cvs (no deletions, no branches), etc.

      Pitiful.

    9. Re:sf.net by PMcGovern · · Score: 1

      Until recently? I think you should check your facts. SF.NET runs on close to 80 servers. The site has never run on one server. I'm not aware of any OSS project that has more hardware then SF.NET. In fact SF.NET has one of the largest CVS repositories in the world....with many 100's of gigabytes in the tree. The site currently serves over 13,000,000 milllion a day. SF.NET would have no problem hosting Gentoo, but it decided to get out of hosting distros three years ago. (I ran the site for 5 years).

    10. Re:sf.net by Dave2+Wickham · · Score: 1

      Your URL has a ; instead of a :.</offtopic>

    11. Re:sf.net by bangzilla · · Score: 2, Informative

      re: "They're just using the OSS community to get them visibility with corporate sponsors" - not so. When SF.net was launched no one knew how successful it would turn out. First and foremost the objective of SF.net is to do the best it can for the community. Yes money is needed to keep the site running (as Patrick says in his post, SF.net has *lots* of hardware, and consumes much bandwidth).

      The developers that were laid off were not fired for completing 1.0 of SF.net as you imply. They were laid off along with many others when VA Linux got out of the hardware business. It had zero to do with SF.net, and all to do with the .com crash. We know what we've done for the Open Source community today -- what have you done?

      Please - just the facts....

      --
      Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
    12. Re:sf.net by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What is the point of an SCM without branches?
      How exactly does that help people work together? or at all?

    13. Re:sf.net by hacker · · Score: 2, Interesting
      "We know what we've done for the Open Source community today -- what have you done?"

      I've only contributed patches, fixes, documentation and code to about 300 OSS projects over the last 10+ years. I only provide free, gratis hosting to OSS projects (using 100% Open Source tools, unlike SF.net). I only host dozens of mailing lists for OSS projects, gratis. I'm only the maintainer of about a dozen OSS projects myself.

      So you're right, not much at all.

  17. Re:GMail by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The terrerists dun it.

  18. Re:Being ontopic.. by MoOsEb0y · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Downloads from OSL are the same speed as the rest of the Internet from the school. (100 mbit) The limiting factor is the server. Anyone with a decent host these days has 100mbit, so there's no huge advantage. Oh, and their Gentoo mirror sucks. I get about 40kb/sec off of it. I switched to datapipe.net.

  19. How about some security projects by zymano · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Like developing a new C library thats secure and fast.

    Or how about help developing a java operating system for high security.

    1. Re:How about some security projects by Ninja+Programmer · · Score: 1

      Well I've done part of one:

      http://bstring.sf.net/

      Its not exactly the C library per se, but instead a complete substitute for one part of the C library that is the source for a lot of headaches and security issues; namely strings.

  20. Re:Being ontopic.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sounds like you're pissed off because you cant join that lil-special-club there. It's not their fault that all you can do is bag groceries. Get over it.

  21. Re:Being ontopic.. by ArsenneLupin · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    Google itself is back up, but some peripheral services, such as gmail and adSense are still down...

    If you go to a page that's supposed to have ads, you'll see that sometimes the ad banner is completely absent, while at other times, it is there, but clicking on the ad links leads to nowhere. And very rarely (about once in 10 times), you do get forwarded to the correct place. Weird...

  22. Re:Google is down!!! by X0563511 · · Score: 1

    go to http://gmail.google.com/gmail instead. That works. It's the www.gmail.com domain that's down I think.

    --
    For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
  23. Re:Google is back by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yes, Google news normal page is down, however it can be accessed via this page

    http://news.l.google.com/

    Irrelevant to the main article, but I'm sure more than one person will be interested to know

  24. Re:Being ontopic.. by MoOsEb0y · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    try posting with your real nick, pussy.

  25. Re:Being ontopic.. by ramereth · · Score: 5, Informative

    Where in the world did you get this idea? They just hired another student infact to help out with infrastructure related needs. What is so closed about it? They even had an http://osuosl.org/news_folder/open_house open house not too long ago. Apparently you didn't make it to find out. Also, Scott/Corey/Jason are all well rounded intelligent people have do an excellent job. Kudos on them getting this going!

  26. Re:Being ontopic.. by lappy512 · · Score: 0

    Woah, you had that same problem too?
    I checked, and made a semi-formal study on how google was down.

  27. Re:Google down - Rejected Story by Richard_at_work · · Score: 1
    Seeing as all the regional google sites are still up, and gmail works fine for me, Id say its not a global problem. For interested parties -
    MacOne:~ richard$ host google.com
    google.com has address 216.239.37.99
    google.com has address 216.239.39.99
    google.com has address 216.239.57.99
  28. Re:Being ontopic.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny
  29. Re:Google is down!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    Well, it's back up, but not before I killed all members of my family so they wouldn't have to go through the horror and dark ages of a google-less world....

    sorry, my bad....

  30. Re:OMFG lol GOOGLE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    well done, excellent anti-troll....

  31. There's one in every crowd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    All of the staff look like pretty normal joes, until you get down to Lars, who looks like he stepped out of the LOTR set (or maybe MIT). I feel like I should have to crawl up the side of a mountain to ask him a question. (And not "Are you *really* the head of the Kwik-E-Mart?")

    Then again, maybe you do: the guy lives in a yurt.

    Not that there's anything wrong with that!

    1. Re:There's one in every crowd by ramereth · · Score: 1

      Hey, don't be dissing Lars. I've met him and he is a really cool guy!

    2. Re:There's one in every crowd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think his beard is cool, and I love the yurt.

  32. Big fiery letters by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    Sorry for the inconvenience.

    I'll guess we'll have to do without a search engine tonight...

  33. Re:GREAT STORY by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If noone posts a story about the Google outage...

    The terrorist win.

  34. Already happened by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Google has been down last year's end.... Nothing new.

  35. Re:Being ontopic.. by marineam · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I don't know where you got this idea from. I think the problem is that people who haven't heard much about the OSL just can't quite figgure what the OSL is here to do. There are two main goals, contract work for developing open source software (OSU's Maintain for exampe) and hosting for large projects (Gentoo Linux for example). If you are looking for a group to teach people about Linux, check out the OSLUG http://lug.oregonstate.edu/ if you have not already which is a student driven organization and is very open to the public.

  36. Re:Google down - Rejected Story by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    seti@home is dead too, probably for a different reason though, because its been dead for a while.

  37. Re:Being ontopic.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And what would you do if you had access? Hang out and talk about how you're gonna get a sweet flatscreen monitor for free Real Soon Now?

  38. Re:Being ontopic.. by MoOsEb0y · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I have MySQL, I'm not sure why I'd ever want Access. And what's this about flatscreen monitors?

  39. Re:How long before by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Here's a mirror if you get desperate http://elgoog.rb-hosting.de/index.cgi

  40. Re:Being ontopic.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I hate to break it to you, but the OSL killed Maintain after they assimilated the project from its original developer. Maintain hasn't had a bug fix (or, god forbid, an actual new release) in months.

    And the OSL's goal of "contract[ing] work for developing open source software"? With a portfolio like the OSL's (*zero* projects developed solely by their in-house programmers), I'd say this one's DOA.

  41. Re:Google down - Rejected Story by TechnologyX · · Score: 0, Troll

    I want another -1 faggots

    --
    Slashdot sucks
  42. Re:Being ontopic.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    OSL don't just host 'a Gentoo mirror'. They also host several master and development servers.

  43. Re:Being ontopic.. by kveton · · Score: 1

    Sorry you're seeing slow download speeds. I actually think its a product of our success and part of our effort not to *just* focus on mirroring.

    As for alienating a large portion of campus, I have no idea how you got that idea. Showboating and self-important ranting? What exactly does open source showboating look like?

    I would say we help the academic environment by providing great opportunities for students.

    The OSL has actually brought in quite a bit of money to the University.

  44. Re:Being ontopic.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sooo what you're saying is that not only do they host Gentoo poorly they host a whole bunch of other services at 40KB? Please tell me again how much this has cost the University? Forgive me if I'm not impressed.

  45. Re:Being ontopic.. by kveton · · Score: 1

    Killed Maintain? Actually we've had several internal releases in the last few weeks. We've had several bug fixes in the last several months as well.

    The Bouncer is a pretty fantastic tool that we developed here completely in house. Mozilla likes its to the tune of 50 million downloads. There are several other projects that we participate in as members, doing what our defined role is for OSU; helping OSU participate better in open source projects.

  46. Re:Being ontopic.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "[Slow download speeds are] a product of our success"? Do you even read your own BS, kveton? Last time I checked, hosting a major project means ensuring awesome hosting. kernel.org doesn't seem to have any speed problems.

    "What exactly does open source showboating look like?"

    It looks a lot like www.osuosl.org.

  47. Re:Being ontopic.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This response is classic kveton: draw the crowd in with promises, and then redirect their attention away from the issue.

    An internal release doesn't exactly help the general public, does it?

    Yes, Bouncer's great. But we weren't talking about Bouncer, we were talking about Maintain. When you can show us a project written entirely by the OSL from start to finish, then maybe we'll take the OSL seriously.

  48. Re:The OSL is a joke by kveton · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, the OSL is not a running joke around OSU. We're a fantastic team that is helping moving open source forward at the University and in the world.

    Talk with our students, talk with all of our customers, talk with Mozilla, Gentoo, Debian, KernelTrap and ask them how much we suck. Lemme know how that goes for you.

    The running joke is anonymous cowards that don't have the backbone to stick behind what they say.

  49. Re:Being ontopic.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What exactly was the role of the OSL in the development of the bouncer? Did the OSL write code, act as a middle man or something else?

  50. Re:Being ontopic.. by Geoffreyerffoeg · · Score: 1

    "What exactly does open source showboating look like?"

    It looks a lot like www.osuosl.org.


    (I'm going to take the karma hit because kveton doesn't deserve it.)

    Shut up. You're the perfect example of anti-open source showboating. Are you doing anything to help open source? Didn't think so. Show some respect for the OSL. Would you prefer that people stop hosting or mirroring projects because they don't have sufficient hosting?

    Do you even read your own BS, Mr. Anonymous Coward? Coward indeed.

  51. Re:Being ontopic.. by kveton · · Score: 1

    I'm really sorry you're so frustrated with us. I bet 10 minutes with our staff and seeing what we have really accomplished would change your mind.

  52. Re:Being ontopic.. by kveton · · Score: 1

    The OSL wrote the whole thing. Start to finish. v2.0 will be sometime in the next week or two.

  53. Re:Being ontopic.. by kveton · · Score: 1

    LOL. "Classic kveton" huh?

    Do you participate in Maintain? I didn't think so. The users of Maintain do and all of them have the same access to the SVN repository as the rest do.

  54. Re:Being ontopic.. by ampmouse · · Score: 1

    You get 40kb/sec! That seems fairly fast to me. If I could download anything on the internet at 40kb/sec I would be happy. The fastest I seem to be able to get is 28kb/sec...

  55. Re:The OSL is a joke by ouzel · · Score: 1

    You know not of what you speak. The OSL has brought in a tremendous amount of money to OSU in the short time they have existed. Not only have they produced unique solutions for folks on campus (and farther away), they have generated a great deal of interest in open source technology within the campus community.

    In addition to open source development activities, they are providing reliable hosting to some of the largest open source projects around.

    What about education, you say? The OSL is providing unique job opportunities to students interested in open source technologies. Many students are choosing OSU over other schools in part because of the OSL.

    They are not seen as a joke at OSU; on the contrary, they are seen as an asset.

  56. So why isn't OSU using Moodle? by MichaelPenne · · Score: 1
  57. As a side thought... by suitepotato · · Score: 1

    ...is there any way this works to the advantage of keeping fire under the rear ends of the Debian people to move forward at something other than their historical snails' pace?

    Also, do we need to have SF vs. OSL flaming? Either way, we have repositories for the OSS world to work with. Most of the stuff I use is over at SF for both Linux and Windows. However, if something is homed at OSL, that's cool too.

    --
    If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)