Alpine Linux In An Infrastructure Crisis With Equinix Metal Sunsetting

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  • phoronix
    Administrator
    • Jan 2007
    • 67370

    Alpine Linux In An Infrastructure Crisis With Equinix Metal Sunsetting

    Phoronix: Alpine Linux In An Infrastructure Crisis With Equinix Metal Sunsetting

    Last week I wrote about the crisis plaguing X.Org / FreeDesktop.org with losing out on their cloud/server infrastructure due to losing out on their free server resources provided by Equinix at the end of April. It's not only FreeDesktop.org and all those hosted projects now rushing to find hosting alternatives and sponsorships to cover new costs, but it turns out the Alpine Linux project is also in a similar position...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite
  • mirmirmir
    Senior Member
    • Jan 2021
    • 584

    #2
    So much for year of Linux desktop 😔😔

    Comment

    • roviq
      Junior Member
      • Aug 2022
      • 23

      #3
      I always get my Linux distro installers via torrent magnets, this should alleviate in some way the bandwidth requirements, although packages and mirrors doesn't have a distributed/p2p way to distribute I guess... Maybe it is time for packaging software developers to think about a way to do this for packages.

      I mean, my Windows 11 machines share the bandwidth of updates between them, and I use local caches for my packages. So, it is time to move towards this across all levels.

      Comment

      • TheMightyBuzzard
        Senior Member
        • Sep 2021
        • 416

        #4
        Originally posted by roviq View Post
        I always get my Linux distro installers via torrent magnets, this should alleviate in some way the bandwidth requirements, although packages and mirrors doesn't have a distributed/p2p way to distribute I guess... Maybe it is time for packaging software developers to think about a way to do this for packages.

        I mean, my Windows 11 machines share the bandwidth of updates between them, and I use local caches for my packages. So, it is time to move towards this across all levels.
        That's a good technical solution for the bandwidth requirements if not the hosting space. A good meatspace solution would be not depending on the kindness of strangers for your home. Both together would be ideal.

        Comment

        • pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx
          Senior Member
          • Jul 2020
          • 1591

          #5
          Originally posted by roviq View Post
          I always get my Linux distro installers via torrent magnets, this should alleviate in some way the bandwidth requirements, although packages and mirrors doesn't have a distributed/p2p way to distribute I guess... Maybe it is time for packaging software developers to think about a way to do this for packages.

          I mean, my Windows 11 machines share the bandwidth of updates between them, and I use local caches for my packages. So, it is time to move towards this across all levels.
          I've always felt like creating your own mirror / cache is too much of a PITA on most distros. Having something akin to torrent support for your package cache built right into the package manager would be neat. All packages would still be signed / hashed. A "turn it on" easy button that dealt with opening up the local firewall and ran some super minimal attack surface server, and an easy way to add that mirror to your clients (that part is already easy) or a 'find automatically on your local network' option would be cool. Most of us waste a shit ton of bandwidth on updates when we have multiple machines.

          Steam does this automatically now too for game downloads on the local network.

          Comment

          • peterdk
            Senior Member
            • Feb 2020
            • 204

            #6
            Originally posted by pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx View Post

            I've always felt like creating your own mirror / cache is too much of a PITA on most distros. Having something akin to torrent support for your package cache built right into the package manager would be neat. All packages would still be signed / hashed. A "turn it on" easy button that dealt with opening up the local firewall and ran some super minimal attack surface server, and an easy way to add that mirror to your clients (that part is already easy) or a 'find automatically on your local network' option would be cool. Most of us waste a shit ton of bandwidth on updates when we have multiple machines.

            Steam does this automatically now too for game downloads on the local network.
            Yeah, I have 6 VM's and when I download linux-firmware apt updates on all of them that's 6 x 500MB. I would love to easily enable a local cache, but last time I looked (many years ago) this was not trivial.

            update
            Hmm,I just enabled squid deb proxy, and this seems to be working very nicely without any config on clients besides a package install. Nice!
            Last edited by peterdk; 03 February 2025, 04:42 PM.

            Comment

            • Guiorgy
              Phoronix Member
              • Jul 2024
              • 51

              #7
              Originally posted by roviq View Post
              [...] Maybe it is time for packaging software developers to think about a way to do this for packages.

              I mean, my Windows 11 machines share the bandwidth of updates between them, and I use local caches for my packages. So, it is time to move towards this across all levels.
              Second that, and also, would be nice to have an open source distributed CI project simmilar to Folding At Home, where users could dedicate some of their excess hardware full time or only while idling.

              Comment

              • TheMightyBuzzard
                Senior Member
                • Sep 2021
                • 416

                #8
                Originally posted by peterdk View Post

                Yeah, I have 6 VM's and when I download linux-firmware apt updates on all of them that's 6 x 500MB. I would love to easily enable a local cache, but last time I looked (many years ago) this was not trivial.

                update
                Hmm,I just enabled squid deb proxy, and this seems to be working very nicely without any config on clients besides a package install. Nice!
                It's pretty trivial to set up a private binary package repo for Gentoo but that's Gentoo-trivial not Ubuntu-trivial. It's less useful if you're building for heterogeneous systems and use things like --march=native though.

                Comment

                • Etherman
                  Senior Member
                  • Dec 2017
                  • 294

                  #9
                  Originally posted by mirmirmir View Post
                  So much for year of Linux desktop 😔😔
                  This news is about Alpine Linux.

                  But I guess there is somebody somewhere trying to use it as a desktop system for whatever reason.

                  Comment

                  • Vorpal
                    Senior Member
                    • Mar 2020
                    • 403

                    #10
                    Originally posted by roviq View Post
                    I always get my Linux distro installers via torrent magnets, this should alleviate in some way the bandwidth requirements, although packages and mirrors doesn't have a distributed/p2p way to distribute I guess... Maybe it is time for packaging software developers to think about a way to do this for packages.

                    I mean, my Windows 11 machines share the bandwidth of updates between them, and I use local caches for my packages. So, it is time to move towards this across all levels.
                    I set up pacredir to do this for my Arch Linux computers at home. Based on mdns for discovery it checks which other local computers might already have the package downloaded. Just enable some services and open some firewall ports for the home zone (I use firewalld), seems to work well.

                    Maybe something like that is available for other distros too? It was nice back when I had 150/10, now with 500/500 it doesn't matter so much.

                    But downloads also use mirrors for Arch at least, so I would imagine Alpine would too? Presumably this is bandwidth to let mirrors sync, and for building.

                    Comment

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