Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/popular-linux-orgs-freedesktop-and-alpine-linux-are-scrambling-for-new-web-hosting/

by ossusermivami • 1 year ago

256 118 1 year ago

arstechnica.com

electricant• 1 year ago

Not only alpine linux but also X.Org and freedesktop.org

Shakahs• 1 year ago

Per the ongoing Freedesktop discussion, AWS offered to host but Freedesktop is leaning towards self-hosting on Hetzner so they can control their own destiny and sponsors can contribute cash towards the bill instead of donating hardware.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freedesktop/freedesktop/-/iss...

Xunjin3• 1 year ago

Great point, Hetzner has a great price, or even discuss with them a sponsorship too?

weinzierl10• 1 year ago

Hetzner has a great price but it plays not in the same league as AWS. It's cheap and good enough for some applications but I wouldn't call Hetzner a professional service.

rglullis3• 1 year ago

I saw their original announcement and they said that their infra (3 AMD EPYC from generations ago, 3 Intel servers from 2 generations ago, 2 80-core ARM servers) would cost $24k/month at Equinix prices. I checked Hetzner's equivalent offerings, it would be ~$1.5k/month for newer AMD servers. It would probably be even less if they went with older servers listed at their auction. And it probably would be even less if they just moved their CI runners to virtual servers on Hetzner's cloud.

Seriously, Hetzner provides so much move value per dollar, sometimes I fear that one day they will find out and just jack up the prices to match the rest.

hirako20002• 1 year ago

VPS business is very different than the "cloud" space.

Yes yes there are cloud features now offered by VPS providers, but they are add ons to chase demand, they aren't positioning their offering to appeal to users wanting a comprehensive suite of services on the platform. Managed databases, SMTP as a service, deployment as a service etc etc etc. For that reasons market rates are different.

For Hetzner to bump their prices significantly they would need to build a cloud platform a la AWS/GCP/Azure. Won't happen by Xmas even if went all in. They are good at what they do and make money so they stick to that.

iruoy• 1 year ago

They did the calculations for Hetzner themselves and came to $4258.33/mo.

justinclift3• 1 year ago

Hetzner does co-location as well, which would probably be even cheaper?

mysteria• 1 year ago

Hetzner also has the interesting choice of consumer-grade machines which probably work fine in cases where you are constrained by CPU power rather than memory capacity/bandwidth. You'll also lose a bit of redundancy and reliability but that might not be as big of a deal since the machines are managed by them and you can probably get things replaced quickly. For example depending on the workload the CCX43s might be replaceable by the AX52.

Meanwhile for CI runners you probably could split the big bare metal servers down into smaller individual machines and run less jobs of them. Depending on the CI load profile it might also make even more sense to scale out to the cloud on high demand as opposed to having a bunch of mostly idle machines.

mrbluecoat• 1 year ago

Awesome projects and I hope they find a new home soon! For those wanting to donate:

Alpine Linux: https://opencollective.com/alpinelinux

Freedesktop [edit]: ..no crowdsource option at the moment

pabs3• 1 year ago

The second one is only for fprint, a tool for supporting fingerprint scanners (for eg laptop ones) on Linux.

systems_glitch4• 1 year ago

Oh man that sucks! I wonder if we could pull Alpine into our colo, we recently upgraded to a full rack from 2U (it was cheaper than a quarter rack!) and have a ton of space. Plus all of our libvirt/KVM HVMs run Alpine.

plagiarist• 1 year ago

It's surprising to me that Alpine isn't set for life from corporate donations. They're my first choice for laying down the foundation in a container.

rollcat3• 1 year ago

This is why: https://m.xkcd.com/2347/

Now go ask your employer to donate.

klardotsh• 1 year ago

Aside from some major examples, like most of the big tech companies funding the Linux kernel and maybe the Rust and/or Python Foundations in decent numbers, for the most part, corporations don't pay for open-source. That's why they love it so much: it costs ~$0, but generates immense business value for them (in that they don't have to write, debug, or maintain any of that, often essential, code or infra).

I can think of maybe three exceptions my entire career, and none of them were especially huge contributions.

jmclnx• 1 year ago

RHEL (IBM) is doing well, why can't they provide free hosting and at the same time show off their cloud products ?

RHEL benefits from freedesktop and X, and as a show of good faith they could support Alpine too.

But as we all know, RHEL/IBM only wants to take free labor and not really give back these days :(

Sammi• 1 year ago

Redhat, Canonical, IBM, Oracle, Google, hell even Microsoft... There are a bunch of big actors in the Linux space that could and probably should be financing this. Also there's the Linux Foundation that is made for financing Linux projects.

Sphax• 1 year ago

Aren't they (Red Hat) one of the biggest contributor to Wayland ?

martinsnow2• 1 year ago

Red hat contribute a lot but they don't pay well. I believe their finances are tight.

freedomben3• 1 year ago

But as we all know, RHEL/IBM only wants to take free labor and not really give back these days :(

Ludicrous. Red Hat and IBM are far from perfect, but they are absolute heroes for open source. Listing all the projects that Red Hat pays to develop would be very difficult because it's so long. They've even acquired proprietary companies and open sourced their products (while the product was still selling and highly useful!), something virtually nobody does.

bityard• 1 year ago

Sure, they likely could. But then the complaint would be, "Arrg, I can't believe Freedesktop.org and Alpine are now effectively owned by Red Hat/IBM now, arrg!"

Also, Red Hat typically only "sponsors" open source projects that they have some business dependency on. Freedesktop.org might be a good candidate, but Alpine could be harder to justify. I don't know of any RH product that uses Alpine directly. (Most enterprises only have exposure to Alpine through container images.)

mobilio• 1 year ago

It looks as a job for Cloudflare: https://cloudflaremirrors.com/

But i don't know who is responsible for that.

rollcat3• 1 year ago

While I have mixed feelings about Cloudflare, I don't see why you have been downvoted. This is on topic for the discussion, already implemented for a couple distros, etc.

The question of "who is responsible": anyone is free to run their own mirror, after all this software is freely redistributable.

As for "why not", if I were to lead a project like Alpine, I would insist that the org stays in control of its own infrastructure. Mirrors are also only one chunk of the problem; you also need builder machines.

bananapub• 1 year ago

I don't see why you have been downvoted.

presumably because it's a silly idea, given Cloudflare isn't a colo or dedicated server company and they won't let you just rack machines in their DCs for the same reason Google won't.

jtrn• 1 year ago

I haven't looked into it, so there might be a good reason, but why isn't peer-to-peer technology utilized more and more for stuff like this? I had hoped that BitTorrent would have made these things a solved problem. I looked into Storj earlier, but it seemed too controlled/unpredictable/centralized. Anybody have some good insights into this?

gosub100• 1 year ago

I think it's the same reason PGP never caught on. The learning curve is just too steep.

There are 3 major concepts: understanding how to run the comnand, understanding the idea of public key crypto, and actually using it (i.e. NOT imaging the ISO unless the signature passes).

What it needs is something like a torrent client that 1) doesn't let you download unless you supply the expected SHA first, and perhaps 2) that it verifies that the hash came from the signed webpage where you got the torrent link. Too many people (myself included) think it's not going to happen to them (download a backdoored program/OS).

After 20 years in the industry I'm just now learning how certificates work and how to work with them.

rollcat3• 1 year ago

I think it's the same reason PGP never caught on. The learning curve is just too steep.

This is what I always emphasise: usability first. If a solution is secure on paper, but confusing to use, then it's not secure - the user can get confused and do the wrong thing. Defaults matter.

What it needs is something like a torrent client that 1) doesn't let you download unless you supply the expected SHA first, and perhaps 2) that it verifies that the hash came from the signed webpage where you got the torrent link.

This is already a solved problem. Just provide a magnet link. You already have to trust the website to provide the checksum, so why not trust the link?

As for packages, Debian experimented with a BitTorrent transport for apt a long while ago, but I suppose it didn't catch on. Perhaps this was before BitTorrent had HTTP fallback? Either way, this would be an interesting avenue for research.

565j56j• 1 year ago

The learning curve myth needs to die. It can be solved with good UX but there is no real profit in that so you will never see any company dedicate marketing dollars towards it. So truly decentralized and distributed technologies die because no one wants to spend money to market them for free.

zx2c43• 1 year ago

The WireGuard project is also in the same situation, due to Equinix Metal shutting down. If anybody would like to host us, please reach out to team at wireguard dot com. Thanks!

rudasn• 1 year ago

Hey! Just wanted to say thank you for wireguard :)

Hope you find a host soon!

bestham• 1 year ago

I guess Tailscale or Mullvad should consider hosting you.

likeabatterycar2• 1 year ago

What prevents Wireguard from moving to GitHub or why is bare metal hosting needed?

The code is small and integrated into the kernel at this point.

Aren't your needs primarily for distributing Windows/Mac packages at this point?

zx2c43• 1 year ago

No, it's considerably more involved than that. For example, there's extensive CI: https://www.wireguard.com/build-status/ This thing builds a fresh kernel and boots it for every commit for a bunch of systems. And there's also a lot of long running fuzzing and SAT solving and all sorts of other heavy computation happening during different aspects of development. Development is a bit more than just pushing some code up to Github and hoping for the best.

briffle• 1 year ago

have you looked into Oregon State University's Open Source Lab? https://osuosl.org/communities/

They host quite a few open source projects there. And seem to be one of the few that also hosts for ARM and POWERPC projects.

zx2c43• 1 year ago

Saw that. Looks appealing, but I'm not particularly keen on, "We only require that you keep one sudo-enabled account on the system for us to use as needed for troubleshooting." [1] Do I want to give root access to the project's master git server to somebody I've never met, who is probably a good & nice person, but not really directly associated with the project? In general, I'm wary of places with relaxed enough informal policies that somebody could just walk over to a machine and fiddle with it. It's not that I actually intend to do some kind of top secret computing on Internet-facing machines like those, but I also don't want to have to be _as_ concerned about those edge cases when I'm deciding which things to run or host on it.

[1] https://osuosl.org/services/hosting/details/

systems_glitch4• 1 year ago

Email sent, we can probably host you.

drio• 1 year ago

Hi Jason,

Thank you for wireguard - it's been a hugely impactful piece of software.

Do you think it would be helpful to outline what hardware resources you would need to successfully migrate the project and all the CI/CD computations to a new home? This would help people determine if they can help with hosting.

voxadam2• 1 year ago

Oregon State University's Open Source Lab (https://osuosl.org/) offers managed and unmanaged hosting to open source projects. They even have IBM Z and POWER10 hosting if you're into that sort of thing.

stonogo3• 1 year ago

This has been brought up with freedesktop and they handwaved it away. They claim they want to DIY with donation money but they don't have a donation mechanism and I suspect they don't know how much work just handling money is.

voxadam2• 1 year ago

They offer colocation as well.

https://osuosl.org/services/hosting/details/

jorams• 1 year ago

This has been brought up with freedesktop and they handwaved it away. They claim they want to DIY with donation money

You are making all of this sound way more definitive than the ticket. The donation money approach is the personal opinion of the sysadmin. The OSUOSL is brought up, some explanations are added that make it more attractive and remove some doubts, and beyond that it's waiting for the board to decide what's next.

loganmarchione• 1 year ago

So far, the Equinix Metal shutdown affects Freedesktop, Alpine, WireGuard, and Flathub. Why can't these organizations use VMs? Is there something special about bare-metal services, or has Equinix not offered their VM service to these organizations?

acatton• 1 year ago

How are VMs solving this issue? You cannot just snapshot them and migrate them to another provider. You'll get different local-IPv4 and different IPv6, etc.

indigodaddy• 1 year ago

So what, they didn't BYOIPs with equinix did they? It's trivial to update IPs in a migrated VM image

johnklos7• 1 year ago

VMs introduce security issues that bare metal don't have. Those security issues are mostly academic for most people and many projects, but not for software where a supply chain compromise could severely impact all users of that software.

Imagine if Wireguard were backdoored because someone working for the ISP that runs the VMs compromised their VMs through the hypervisor. How would a project audit an ISP? How could anything be trusted? Bottom line: it can't. ISPs don't give that kind of information to customers unless you're special (government, spend crazy money).

While it's still possible to compromise a machine through physical access, it's MUCH more difficult. How do you bring it in to single user mode to introduce a privileged user without people noticing that it's down, even momentarily, or that the uptime is now zero? Compromise like this is possible, but worlds more difficult to pull off than compromise through hypervisor.

thatSteveFan• 1 year ago

Possible I'm just not remembering the history right, but I think this is from when "Equinix metal" was packet.com. I think this is a handshake deal they had from before they were bought, and it's going away as packet.com becomes more integrated into Equinix.

johnklos7• 1 year ago

Is colocation knowledge lost now? Do people no longer know how to configure a server or three, bring them to colo and run them? I don't understand how this is a story worthy of an Ars Technica article. Where's the issue?

If the issue is cost, slightly older Epyc hardware is quite affordable, and colo deals can be found for extremely reasonable costs. If it's expertise, then all they have to do is ask.

mauricio• 1 year ago

Did you read the article? There are large storage and bandwidth requirements.

johnklos7• 1 year ago

Yes, I did, of course.

Storage is MUCH cheaper when you colo, and bandwidth requirements are a large part of why you colocate instead of just running servers out of an office building that has at least two upstream connections.

I'm really curious what you think they're using now. Certainly you read the article... It says they're using bare metal servers. That's basically colo where the provider owns, but doesn't control, the hardware.

caspper69• 1 year ago

I'm sure this isn't relevant everywhere, but all my old colo hotspots within driving distance have started charging exorbitant $$ for egress, just like the cloud.

Still more economical than cloud, but it seems like this has become far too common.

systems_glitch4• 1 year ago

Judging from former jobs, yeah, kinda lost :/ We still colo, it's way more cost effective than PaaS or VMs or someone else's bare metal.

FuriouslyAdrift3• 1 year ago

Why is this stuff not primarily hosted via bittorrent, now?

Even Microsoft updates can use end user device distributed hosting.

mrweasel• 1 year ago

How do you host bug trackers, git repos, CI runners or mailinglists on Bittorrent?

Admittedly I am rather surprised by the storage requirements from Freedesktop.

FuriouslyAdrift3• 1 year ago

You could host all of that on a single small VM or physical server.

dehrmann• 1 year ago

Broader question, but whatever happened to every university with a CS department hosting mirrors of popular distros? I always assumed CDNs replaced them, but seeing this, maybe they didn't.

stonogo3• 1 year ago

The MBAs took over. Public service doesn't "generate renevue."

fph• 1 year ago

FWIW in Italy we still have [GARR Mirror](https://mirror.garr.it/index_en.html). It includes Alpine Linux.

Arnavion• 1 year ago

Maybe not every university, but plenty of distro mirrors are still hosted by universities, both in the US and internationally. Another example is Oregon State University mentioned elsewhere in this thread that still provides hosting + CI services; eg postmarketOS recently moved from gitlab.com to a self-hosted GitLab on OSU-provided and -hosted hardware.

DaSHacka• 1 year ago

Most mirrors are run by clubs at universities, typically LUGs or similar.

I'm not sure how many mirrors are run by the university directly, though AFAIK MIT and RIT host theirs directly.

1970-01-012• 1 year ago

Both services have largely depended on free server resources ...

Running on 'large donations' is not a viable strategy for any long-term goal. Perhaps its time for Linux to consider running a tiny datacenter of its very own to both dog-feed itself and give itself extra momentum or inertia from donation stall-out?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food

kazen44• 1 year ago

so, the linux foundation (or torvalds himself, whatever) should run a entire datacenter right now?

You know running an anctual datacenter with all its cooling ,storage, networking and power requirements is a full time job for several people right? Why not put bare metal in someplace which already does that for far cheaper and better?

1970-01-012• 1 year ago

Saying it's far cheaper without actual numbers is not saying anything. 10 years in a DC is 14% cheaper than going in with a provider. This donation money can simply be better spent if long term goals are considered.

supriyo-biswas• 1 year ago

Isn’t fly.io all hosted on Equinix Metal too? Or are they using their collocation services?

reincoder• 1 year ago

When it comes to mirror sponsorships, we (IPinfo) offer IP location data sponsorship. We spoke with Alma Linux and they used our IP location data to route traffic for their mirror system: https://almalinux.org/blog/2024-08-07-mirrors-1-to-400/

At the moment, we operate 900 servers. We evaluated the idea of hosting mirrors on some of our servers, but our servers are not super powerful, and we have to pay for bandwidth. We use these servers in our production pipeline. Maintenance alone is a massive task, and hosting distro mirrors could be incredibly challenging. We are not at that scale yet.

We could provide IP location data sponsorship to popular distro mirror systems, which would make traffic routing and load distributions more effective.

0xbadcafebee• 1 year ago

Old-school open source projects got hosting from hundreds of mirrors, mostly universities and ISPs, and some businesses. If you have lots of mirrors you don't need as much traffic per host.

HackerThemAll• 1 year ago

All the big cloud behemoths benefit A LOT from Alpine. And helping Alpine would be pennies for them.

Popular Linux orgs Freedesktop and Alpine Linux are scrambling for new webhost

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