flathub update / mini infrastructure fundraiser - DONE! woohoo!

[Robert McQueen]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your additional support! I ordered the server last week and
we got access over the weekend, and I've been able to pay their invoice
thanks to the generous support of all our donors:
  Alex Larsson
  Andreas Nilsson
  Arun Raghavan
  Bartłomiej Piotrowski
  Christian Hegert
  Christopher Halse Rogers
  Cosimo Cecchi
  Emmanuele Bassi
  G Stavracas Neto
  Jakub Steiner
  James Shubin
  Joaquim Rocha
  Jorge García Oncins
  Lubomír Sedlář
  Nathan Dyer
  Nick Richards
  Mario Sanchez Prada
  Matthias Clasen
  Michael Doherty
  Zach Oglesby

In the end, we actually raised in total £1027.39 - which covered both
the £960 server invoice and also the £78 I spent on 2x Yubikeys. This
will let the repo master server make GPG signatures using the Yubikey's
"smartcard" functionality over USB, but the secret key can't be
copied/removed from the server. (Alex and I will keep a copy of the
master key offline in case we need to re-issue/revoke/etc the master.)

And of course thanks also to Mythic Beasts who have given us use of a
nice 2TB RAID, 16GB RAM, 4-core Xeon L5000 server with heaps of
bandwidth, free management service & backup space.

Thanks again to everyone for their generosity! Now time to get it all
set up...

Regards,
Rob

On 13/06/17 21:39, Robert McQueen wrote:
> I was just about to write a mail saying we're all done and I was going
> to place the order - then I realised... the quote is £800 + VAT (UK
> sales tax) so the total needed is actually 960 GBP. Oops.
> 
> Anyway - we've reached a very impressive £800 thanks to our generous
> donors so far:
>  Alex Larsson
>  Andreas Nilsson
>  Bartłomiej Piotrowski
>  Christian Hegert
>  Cosimo Cecchi
>  G Stavracas Neto
>  Jakub Steiner
>  Nathan Dyer
>  Nick Richards
>  Mario Sanchez Prada
>  Matthias Clasen
>  Michael Doherty
> 
> I'm going to put in the extra bit for now and just get the order placed
> so we can do the interesting (ok - if you like servers) work, but if
> anyone has got a little bit more down the back of the sofa, it will all
> go towards hosting Flathub either this year or next.
> 
> Thanks again! :)
> 
> Regards,
> Rob
> 
> On 13/06/17 12:40, Robert McQueen wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Just a quick e-mail to update on what I've been doing with Flathub
>> seeing as we've missed the calls for the past couple of weeks (although
>> I hope we can meet again on Monday)?
>>
>> I've made a few notes at
>> https://github.com/flathub/flathub/wiki/Launch-Todo but it would be good
>> to update with the stuff I'm missing - am sure we're missing lots of
>> stuff as I know Nuritzi and Michael have been working on some
>> launch/communications planning too.
>>
>> Legal:
>>
>> The GNOME Foundation agreed to support Flathub by offering the support
>> of their legal advisors, so I sat down last week with Neil McGovern and
>> sent out our initial queries/requests to get the ball rolling on the
>> contributor/uploader agreement and end-user terms of use. We're waiting
>> to hear back with a confirmation about who can do the work.
>>
>> Infrastructure:
>>
>> GNOME has offered that their sysadmin (Andrea Veri) can help with some
>> of the set-up/monitoring but we'd like to keep the Flathub
>> infrastructure independent from GNOME's so that we can make our own
>> decisions about eg, making it easier to install proprietary apps,
>> collecting donations for app authors, etc.
>>
>> We've got donated build nodes from Codethink and cloud credit from
>> Scaleway, but we're still "squished" in with 6-7 VMs on our 50 EUR /
>> month credit - and it's a bit of a production blocker as it's not the
>> most reliable (LVM + nbd = already broke last weekend :/) and has no
>> redundancy/backups in place.
>>
>> The thinking is that for the time being, rather than going Full Cloud
>> (tm) we can just get "a server" to host the main repo and buildbot
>> master, and use other hosts/nodes as build slaves, frontends, mirrors,
>> etc - more distributed workloads where it's easier to integrate
>> different providers and transient cloud instances.
>>
>> A UK-based ISP (Mythic Beasts) has offered that if we pay their basic
>> co-location fee of 800 GBP / year, they will donate a server (2x1TB
>> RAID, 2-4 cores, 8-16GB RAM), 100TB/month bandwidth, monitoring and
>> management services, so we're hoping to move forwards with that plan
>> this week.
>>
>> Fundraise:
>>
>> To get the initial server ordered, we're trying to raise the necessary
>> 800 GBP today - thanks to the generosity of #flatpak we've actually
>> already raised 532 this morning. For convenience and considering it's
>> not the world's largest sum of money we've been using
>> https://paypal.me/ramcq so far - so the money is going to me personally
>> and I will pay it directly over to the ISP - and I'll use any surplus
>> for extending the server past the first year.
>>
>> Thanks all!
>>
>> Regards,
>> Rob
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Flatpak at lists.freedesktop.org
>> https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/flatpak
>>
> 
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