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Inside Oregon State University's Open Source Lab
In his main page debut, ramereth writes with a look at the infrastructure of OSUOSL from Linux.com. From the article: "Many people use Linux in many ways, often totally unaware that they're depending on Linux. Likewise, those of us in the open source community depend heavily on Oregon State University's Open Source Labs (OSUOSL), but may not even realize just how much. Thanks to one of the final talks at LinuxCon by Lance Albertson, it's much clearer now just how important OSUOSL is."
Everybody, sing along: OSU-OSL, M-O-U-S-E!
It may well be a very important lab, but this piece reads a bit like fluff. The fact that one of the lab's members gave a talk saying it's important isn't the world's most neutral assessment of its importance; that is pretty much what people do when representing their labs at conferences.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Quack like the open source ducks you are, Oregon! ;->~
Seriously, though, the best part of Open Source is they go away with treatment, and an internal solution of Bheer.
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The OSL is probably one of the coolest places on campus. The LUG community at OSU is also a great place for a linux lover.
GO BEAVS!
If I understand that article right, the lab provides hosting to medium-large OSS projects. Is that right? The summary makes it sound like the OSUOSL contributed some often-used libraries or tools, but it just sounds like they leveraged their University bandwidth to feed a server farm. I don't consider that so very impressive.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
You can learn how to do what they do, in your basement, it'll just be somewhat smaller and slower, by at worst only by about two orders of magnitude. In fact my basement is considerably more technologically advanced than their datacenter. In fact, a recent string of emails on the NANOG mailing list about basement labs indicates my basement is relatively crude and simplistic.
Compare and contrast w/ my house
2770 square foot data center with 76 racks
About the same floor size, although they're about seventy racks ahead of me. I had three at one point. Now I have none. Distributed computing...
the connection to the outside world is 2Gbps
OK they have me beat by a factor of 100.
130 virtual machines.
They've got me by a factor of 10, unless the trip thru the journalist filter means they've got 130 virtualization hosts which would imply almost uncountable images. I only have about two dozen images across 4 hosts.
"I hope by the end of the year we'll finally have IPv6."
I've got them beat by about a decade. "Legal reasons" prevent them from running a tunnel over their existing lines to H.E. or sixxs? I've never heard of such a thing. Can't even imagine.
Eventually, Albertson says that the project will be moving to Puppet
I've got them beat by a couple years. Really, once you are "admin" of more than a dozen or so images/servers, you need it...
Ganeti supports Xen and KVM, but Albertson says that the lab has switched over to KVM after having problems with Xen.
I fooled around with them, but I now mostly use LXC images. Kind of a top down approach rather than bottom up. Needless to say, I'm a nearly 100% Debian site, both hosts and images, LXC isn't the kind of thing you use to run W2K or OSX. LXC is really boring, it just works, except for integration with AFS.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Your DVD player, your Flat Panel TV, your BluRay player, your Mp3 player stereo, your router, even some kids toys run Linux.
It's everywhere because Windows cant be and has a gigantic cost compared to using linux in the product.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
From Apache to just about every Linux distro you've ever heard of, they run a mirror for it.
I max out my considerable downstream connection from them frequently. These are cool people doing a pretty cool thing.
Mostly follow the away soccer and crew games, actually.
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This comment comes from someone who used to volunteer at CSOS (Computer Science Outreach Services) at Oregon State University back from 1990 to 1994. CSOS is what eventually became PEAK, now a commercial Internet provider in Corvallis. I used to work directly with folks like Jason Thorpe (NetBSD), Jason Downs (NetBSD/OpenBSD), Jeremy McDermond, John Sechrest (who oversaw everything... sort of), and a couple other equally important folks but whose surnames slip my mind.
CSOS was an interesting project intended to provide access to networked computers (all UNIX of course) and Internet access to the general community of Corvallis. It consisted consisted mainly of NetBSD boxes of all flavours, particularly on HP300 boxes (a couple did run HP/UX), some Wyse/DEC-like terminals, a very large dial-in modem pool (eventually migrated to a couple Annex devices). I believe there was a machine or two which ran 386BSD as well. There were also some other volunteers who did things like Radio Free RAT, which to my knowledge was the first "Internet radio station" streamed live via MBONE and had some electronica bands like Violet Arcana come to the datacenter/offices for an interview and a brief session. At one point they even had a public IRC server (which was connected to what it now called EFNet; irc.csos.orst.edu). I would provide links to all of these things, but there really isn't much on the web about CSOS; about all you can find are the old machines: jacobs, kira, nyssa, king, and poe.csos.orst.edu.
I was never sure where the funding came from, but I imagine the university was the main source, in addition to members of the community (individuals and companies) giving donations.
My points are that 1) CSOS played a small but important role in the overall development of NetBSD and general Internet and community services (again keep in mind the decade in which this was being done!), and 2) Oregon State has a history of doing things like this. I really did expect to see mention of CSOS in Lance's slides, but I digress.
Back in the 70's, I rode down with some students from PSU to a lecture.
As we pulled into the campus, The wise-acre grad student driver noticed the sheep barn.
He stated, And to your right, is the student recreation center.
Good Times.