CIRCLE WITH A DOT

Today begins year 5 of Russia's full scale aggression against Ukraine and it will soon be 12 years since Russia first started this war by illegally occupying and then annexing Crimea.

Fuck Putin, fuck everyone who supported this invasion then, and especially fuck those who through greed, cowardice, or direct allegiance maintain Putin in power today: Kim, Fico, Orban, Xi, Trump.

Ukraine is the only power directly opposing Putin today, which is why I will continue to support it until Putin is defeated, until Russia restores the borders in their 1991 configuration and commits to pay reparations for all the grievous damage it's done and continues to do. Glory to Ukrainians and everyone fighting on their side -- may we all have their resolve and courage when it's time to take arms to defend our homes against a large and bloodthirsty neighbour who comes to pillage and kill.

@mhoye Sure, but as evidenced, they *are* actually giving something back to us -- so these are the good guys.

Let's get mad about all the 99.99% of free software contributors who have not received anything out of donating their time and expertise to the open source ecosystem.

@jbowen @austinspires @mhoye Fastly is already doing a lot for us, for which we love them! However, they are not a great fit for mirrors.kernel.org. I do thank you for the suggestion, though!

@mhoye This post builds up a straw man just to set it on fire. The logos you posted are from companies that donate directly to kernel.org (not Linux Foundation). Kernel.org is a separate legal entity from Linux Foundation and is a registered charitable organization. Donating to kernel.org is tax deductible whereas contributing to the Linux Foundation isn't. These companies are gladly and willingly donating their resources to kernel.org specifically.

The companies supporting kernel.org operations are:

Akamai: provides free hosting to git.kernel.org and lore.kernel.org.
Constellix: provides free DNS hosting with failover and geoDNS.
Fastly: provides CDN services.
Servers.com: provides mirrors.kernel.org hosting (the two nodes that we currently have in operation).
Google: provides a git mirror at kernel.googlesource.com.
Red Hat: donates RHEL licenses.
Linux Foundation: employs staff operating kernel.org

The reason I'm asking for more hosting opportunities for mirrors.kernel.org is two-fold: it's a community service that hosts distros, and not so much the kernel. Providing mirroring opportunities for distros is not our primary charter -- we provide kernel archives, not distro binaries. However, we've operated mirrors.kernel.org for 30-odd years and if we stop running the service, parts of the Internet break (it's a fact). So, we continue operating it and will do so for the foreseeable future.

The second reason is because for many hosting companies it makes a lot of sense to donate hardware and bandwidth to a charitable organization like kernel.org -- for reasons of tax deductions and because it often benefits them directly (their own cloud hosting can then benefit from a tier-1 mirror in their datacentre). So, it makes commercial sense for them to donate to kernel.org as a tax write-off as opposed to for the Linux Foundation to pay for hosting, plus they get other perks, such as getting a bit of publicity, a good standing with fellow nerds, etc.

Your post is unnecessarily inflammatory and poorly informed.

@mori that would be lovely, thanks! Even if we just have an option to use it as a failover in case of trouble (like today).

@mori It fluctuates wildly, but according to pretty graphs, we send about 1TB per hour, or ~2.5 Gbps sustained.

mirrors.kernel.org is down because it threw 2 disks in a RAID-6 array and then ground itself to a halt. I'm trying to resuscitate it. Please use mirrors.edge.kernel.org (it's pointing at our only remaining server that is now up, in Amsterdam).

We need more redundancy for these systems. After exiting Equinix, we are reduced to just 2 nodes (and hence, we're now down to 1 until I rebuild the RAID array on the one that's currently offline).

If you can donate us a server with at least 70TB of space and lots of bandwidth, I'd like to hear from you, but it has to come with hosting, as we don't have any physical datacentres any more and must rely on the kindness of strangers to host them.