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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."
For those wondering about the comment above, the OUS mascot is the bever.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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
Yeah, you need a 2000 year old book to add weight to those sorts of tactics..... ;)
For those wondering about both comments above, both of them are too stupid to spell "beaver".
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.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
For those of you wondering about the fascist above worried about spelling, the mascot is indeed the "bever" which is an abbreviation for "beverage." The OSU mascot really was a cold beer in which a large portion of the campus community imbibes in generous amounts. It is particularly hilarious to watch the mascot running up and down the football field stumbling and unable to run in a straight line. Sadly, the university has "sold out" and allowed the image of the OSU bever to be purchased, and it is now a Coca-Cola. Fortunately, Seagrams has made a small donation to the athletic program so it is not quite as bad as it sounds.
I expect more from the OSS community, than the academic community to be honest. The amount of (CS) papers I've read that either fabricate the results; fail to mention serious drawbacks; only work in extreme edge cases; have hand massaged data sets;or fail to acknowledge any computing advances from the last 10 years; is a bit beyond ludicrous to be honest. At least an OSC project will be honest about the presence of bugs.....
Finally a university that admits what campus life really is about.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If it's any comfort, it's not different in statistics. One of the most often heard excuses when delivering a horribly botched paper is "I thought that's what you wanted to hear". And while they surely will have a great future in the reality of statistics in various companies that fudge them (there's very little truth left in statistics, far too much money involved in it), like your people will have a great future in PR, it's NOT what you want in an academic environment.
Well, not what you should want, please, leave me the last figments of my illusions.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Mostly follow the away soccer and crew games, actually.
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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.
What's funny is we sometimes get abuse emails from ISP's complaining that we are DOS'ing them when in fact its their users just using our mirrors.
Kernel.org and several other sites are hosted here. They do not use the university's bandwith, they have their own connections. Google gave them some funding a few years ago, along with several other companies to help pay for bandwith.
In fact, you can see their bandwith graphs here: from their provider, nero.net, which conglomerates many state of Oregon groups and buys bandwith (similar to badger.NET in wisconsin)
http://netfoo.nero.net/netviewer?meta=partner&locale=OSUOSL
(keep in mind, they have a mirror in the midwest provided by (I think) TDS)
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
(keep in mind, they have a mirror in the midwest provided by (I think) TDS)
That is correct. We have two FTP mirrors hosted by TDS (Chicago and New York) in addition to the systems we have on campus in Crovallis.
We employ roughly as many programmers as sysadmins, and write plenty of code. http://code.osuosl.org/
~ C.
(keep in mind, they have a mirror in the midwest provided by (I think) TDS)
That is correct. We have two FTP mirrors hosted by TDS (Chicago and New York) in addition to the systems we have on campus in Crovallis.
You can see their bandwidth utilization here: http://ftpmap.osuosl.org/
Keep in mind that the Corvallis server is out of rotation currently because of some hardware issues.
https://github.com/MostAwesomeDude
https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/MostAwesomeDude
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~csimpson/
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/csimpson/linux-2.6.git;a=summary
Your turn. Put up or shut up. >:3
~ C.
I really did expect to see mention of CSOS in Lance's slides, but I digress.
That predates me by quite a bit and had never heard that story before. I'm surprised John Sechrest never told it to me when he was still living in Corvallis. Its very interesting to hear that though! I will have to remember that the next time I give this presentation. Thanks!
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.