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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."
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".
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 am not a full-timer, and I am not speaking on behalf of OSL.
The "legal reasons" alluded to are mostly problems with other signers on the contract for our upstream bandwidth provider. *coughDuckscough* At our bandwidth scale, tunneling is not feasible.
We don't run Puppet at the moment, we run CFEngine. Everybody's receiving Puppet training and there's a slow-yet-steady migration to Puppet, but these things take time. There are quite a few people depending on us to not fuck up, so we don't change our stacks without deliberation and testing.
~ C.
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?
We employ roughly as many programmers as sysadmins, and write plenty of code. http://code.osuosl.org/
~ C.