X.Org Foundation Board of Directors 2010 Election

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 07:00:40PM +0100, Matthias Hopf wrote:
> On Feb 16, 10 09:20:44 -0800, Keith Packard wrote:
> > On Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:54:56 +0100, Matthias Hopf <mhopf at suse.de> wrote:
> > > But something like $100 / month sounds like a reasonable upper limit for
> > > me, and you should actually get by for half of it.
> > 
> > We've got three servers and a switch; the 3U servers are $1200/year, and
> > the 2U server + switch is $600.
> 
> Thanks for the insight, Keith!
> 
> These prices look reasonable for rented servers. Question is rather
> 
> 1) are the servers in X.org's possession or rented

Two of them are kind of in X.Org's possession, but have effectively been
donated to MIT by Sun with the caveat that they're for the exclusive use
of the X.Org Foundation (yeah, I know this is weird -- shrug).  The
other (expo.x.org, which is actually online) I believe to be in the
Foundation's possession, but I can't say for sure.

> 2) why we had this many servers at all

expo (the 2U machine) was there originally, and this serves the needs of
*.x.org fairly well.  The 3U machines were donated by Sun and were
earmarked for backup, redundancy, sharing fd.o workload (including
mirroring), etc.

> 3) why are 3U servers needed (drives, or are they just in the possession
>    of Xorg - in that case buing some new cheaper to host hardware might
>    be interesting)

It's just what we got.  I'm reasonably surprised that 3U space
apparently costs as much as 2x 2U spaces though ... hm.  In any case, I
don't see anything particularly wrong with 3U.  Certainly, it doesn't
make any sense at all to go to 1U: most (close to all, really) of the
fd.o performance problems we've had have come from crap disks, and you
don't get better disks with a smaller form factor.

If we're going to buy hardware, then I'd personally recommend 2U units
(the HP ProLiant DL385s we have for fd.o have been fantastic), but as
these were donated and aren't a significant financial drain relative to
our funding base, I don't see any reason to ditch them if they're useful
to us.

Certainly it would be useful to get them up and running for backups,
maybe testing, and redundancy at some point in the future.  We actually
tried a while ago, but had myriad issues with them and ended up just
leaving it.

> Going forward it's probably a good thing that we have enough server
> power, and I assume it's just the good ol' "nobody has any time left to
> work on that" issue.  :-/

:)

Cheers,
Daniel
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/attachments/20100216/c9110577/attachment.pgp>