It turns out that the release of Centos-3.3 was so popular, that it threw us way over the threshold of our ISP's, and now we are stuck with a _very_ large bill (as in an estimated 6TB of transfers). While in one hand I am ecstatic that we are so successful, but on the other hand, that is coming out of the developers pockets. The developers should be the last ones footing these bills (and this one was very large). You can help. Please consider a donation for each of the systems that you are using. A reasonable donation we think starts at $12US per system per year. That money is only spent on infrastructure and development. $12 is much cheaper then a magazine subscription, and if everyone contributes their share, we will be able to grow our infrastructure to better handle our growing user base, and continue to provide software to the community. Please visit http://www.caosity.org/contributing/ to do your part. -- Greg M. Kurtzer http://runlevelzero.net/ http://caosity.org/ http://warewulf-cluster.org/
> -----Original Message----- > From: centos-admin at caosity.org > [mailto:centos-admin at caosity.org] On Behalf Of Greg M. Kurtzer > Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 10:33 AM > To: centos at caosity.org; caos at caosity.org > Subject: [Centos] Release of centos-3.3 ISP bill > > It turns out that the release of Centos-3.3 was so popular, > that it threw us > way over the threshold of our ISP's, and now we are stuck > with a _very_ large > bill (as in an estimated 6TB of transfers). While in one hand > I am ecstatic > that we are so successful, but on the other hand, that is > coming out of the > developers pockets. The developers should be the last ones > footing these > bills (and this one was very large). > > You can help. Please consider a donation for each of the > systems that you are > using. A reasonable donation we think starts at $12US per > system per year. > That money is only spent on infrastructure and development. > $12 is much > cheaper then a magazine subscription, and if everyone > contributes their > share, we will be able to grow our infrastructure to better > handle our > growing user base, and continue to provide software to the community. > > Please visit http://www.caosity.org/contributing/ to do your part. > -- > Greg M. KurtzerGreg, 1 - I will be glad to make a donation to your project. I would be happier using Paypal than entering my CC info on every site that has a donations policy. Any chance of you creating a PayPal account? 2 - As founder of www.contribs.org (SME Server) I ran into the bandwidth issue bigtime each time there was a release or upgrade. The solution we finally came to worked well for everyone. We simply got a mirror at Ibiblio and a few others and then we rsync the appropriate directories over to the mirrors. All downloads happen at the mirror sites and the bandwidth that you have is reserved for the website. Thanks to you and all the other folks who make it possible for us to lurk the lists and utilize your work product. -Jeff Coleman
Greg, Maybe a glitch in CentOS or YUM made the bill higher than it needed to be. I recently moved two systems from CentOS 3.1 to 3.3. On both machines, I started with yum.conf files pointed at my own mirror. On both machines, all I did was "yum update", but my yum.conf was renamed, and I got new yum.conf files pointed at mirror.centos.org. I was watching this carefully only because I migrating these two systems in part to test my own mirrors. If not for that, I might not have noticed the switch. (And because I am testing my own mirrors, I got rid of the new yum.conf files and put my own back immediately.) Maybe lots of other sites got switched to mirror.centos.org and they have not even noticed. Or they assumed the upgrade switched them because cAos wants them to update off mirror.centos.org, so they left the new yum.conf as is. This could be the main cause of the big bill. Rick
I have received many emails regarding our mirror setup, and people asking more specifics about the amount of data transferred and the costs... Configuration: We rent 3 systems at a colo, all of which come with 1TB of pre-payed for bandwidth. Each of these systems are part of a round robin DNS pool for mirror.caosity.org, and payed for by different members of our devel team. This is where all of our public Tier1 mirrors are supposed to sync from (http://caosity.org/download/mirrors/). Now we already know that _many_ more mirrors then what is listed on our mirror page are sync'ing from it, and individual computers are running yum against it. We thought that the 3TB provided by these mirrors would be sufficient to handle our traffic load. We were right 2-3 months ago. :/ Now,... I said an "estimated 6TB", and here is where I got the estimation. One system's owner is being charged for an _extra_ 1TB of data transfer. I have not heard from the the owners of the other 2 systems yet,... This is why it was an _estimation_ of 6TB. rrDNS is known for not implementing an even rotation (due to caching), so I wouldn't be surprised if the other systems have _slightly_ different numbers. Here is the directory layout of mirror.caosity.org: 5.5G cAos-1 14G cAos-2 6.3G centos-2 31G centos-3 18G centos-3/3.1 14G centos-3/3.3 note: some repos include hard links As cAos-2 is also new (but not released yet), it too would have been a contributor to the transfer load. Usually I don't like to divulge finances as publicly as this, but considering the interest I have gotten I will let on to some numbers... The first bill was in generous excess of $500US. I would imagine that the other two bills will also be near that, putting the grand total somewhere around $1500US. Typically we spend $80US per system (which is reasonable), and this charge is ontop of that. The Foundation also has a rather substantial "I owe you" list to several of the developers which we are hoping will be paid back when/if we receive enough donations. How to fix: We have always been throwing the idea around of blocking access to our primary mirrors and only letting through the Teir1 mirrors. We have not done that (yet) because of the potential of breaking the update stream to many systems (most yum.confs currently point to mirror). Another solution is to get more systems to put into our mirror rrDNS pool. Or we can find someone willing to host a very large temporary mirror for new releases and point people there. We will be discussing these issues and more in IRC #caos for anyone that wish to provide thoughts or input. I hope that clears up some confusion. :) Thank you for all of the interest and ideas that this has sparked. I am sorry if I don't respond directly to each of them, but I think I answered all of the questions that were asked of me in this email. Let me know if I missed something. On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 10:32:32AM -0700, Greg M. Kurtzer wrote:> It turns out that the release of Centos-3.3 was so popular, that it threw us > way over the threshold of our ISP's, and now we are stuck with a _very_ large > bill (as in an estimated 6TB of transfers). While in one hand I am ecstatic > that we are so successful, but on the other hand, that is coming out of the > developers pockets. The developers should be the last ones footing these > bills (and this one was very large). > > You can help. Please consider a donation for each of the systems that you are > using. A reasonable donation we think starts at $12US per system per year. > That money is only spent on infrastructure and development. $12 is much > cheaper then a magazine subscription, and if everyone contributes their > share, we will be able to grow our infrastructure to better handle our > growing user base, and continue to provide software to the community. > > Please visit http://www.caosity.org/contributing/ to do your part. > -- > Greg M. Kurtzer > http://runlevelzero.net/ > http://caosity.org/ > http://warewulf-cluster.org/ > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at caosity.org > http://lists.caosity.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-- Greg M. Kurtzer http://runlevelzero.net/ http://caosity.org/ http://warewulf-cluster.org/
I have been a member of CommunityColo (aka 'CCCP') in the past, and it worked very well for me for about 2 years. Perhaps another solution path to take a look at: http://www.communitycolo.net/ -te Greg M. Kurtzer wrote:> It turns out that the release of Centos-3.3 was so popular, that it threw us > way over the threshold of our ISP's, and now we are stuck with a _very_ large > bill (as in an estimated 6TB of transfers). While in one hand I am ecstatic > that we are so successful, but on the other hand, that is coming out of the > developers pockets. The developers should be the last ones footing these > bills (and this one was very large). > > You can help. Please consider a donation for each of the systems that you are > using. A reasonable donation we think starts at $12US per system per year. > That money is only spent on infrastructure and development. $12 is much > cheaper then a magazine subscription, and if everyone contributes their > share, we will be able to grow our infrastructure to better handle our > growing user base, and continue to provide software to the community. > > Please visit http://www.caosity.org/contributing/ to do your part.-- Troy Engel | Systems Engineer Fluid, Inc | http://www.fluid.com