Your message dated: Sun, 02 May 1999 12:27:19 +0200

>So the questions are:
>1) would cvsup get official blessing and (more importantly) necessary
>	hw resources somewhere ?
>2) who is willing to set it up & maintain ?
>3) who is willing to make m3 & cvsup (binary) packages ?

Hello,

Yesterday, I send Greg an email with an offer to see whether we can host
a/the CVSup server for NetBSD. Today, I discussed this with my co-workers=

and we agreed this would be `a good thing'. Most people would consider ou=
r =

group to be in a luxury position, as we generally have more than sufficie=
nt =

resources available (except time and manpower ;} ).

We have a dedicated fiber connecting our lab to the experimental IPv6
network in Norway which is well-proportioned and rather under-utilized.
We are busy migrating our lab machines and server to IPv6, and plan to =

route *all* our traffic, i.e. IPv4 and IPv6, over this link. I.e. we will=

tunnel IPv4 over IPv6 (instead of the other way around, what most people
do). This link has 10Mbs capacity and can/will grow more or less =

`on demand' up-to 100Mbs. So, we want demand ;), i.e. traffic from the
outside world (both IPv6 and IPv4). This would make us happy, and also
our provider; the Norwegian Academic ISP, Uninett.
 =

In other words, we're willing (even eager) to offer cycles and disk-space=
 =

for a project/service that will generate substantial amounts of net-traff=
ic =

to our server(s). =


At the moment, we're mirroring freebsd and linux stuff (and actually
NetBSD-1.3.3 sources for internal use) taking up about 20GB of diskspace.=

However, being the third freebsd-server in Norway
(www3.no.freebsd.org ftp2.no.freebsd.org) does not generate much external=
 =

traffic. This may change a bit if or when we'd become the first (or one o=
f =

the first) freebsd mirrors on the 6Bone, but still. Being the first and/o=
r
primary NetBSD CVSup server in the world may attract more traffic to us,
which is what we'd like to see. =


If you're afraid Norway is too far away (network-wise), it might be good
to mention that the Norwegian (Scandinavian) IP-infrastructure is among =

the most well-equipped in the world and is at least very well connected =

to the rest of Europe and the Internet backbone. (I'm not Norwegian mysel=
f, =

so this is no patriotic boasting ;). If you're interested in latency/band=
width,
you may want to try our server (not connected to the dedicated link yet) =

at http://www.pasta.cs.uit.no, ftp.pasta.cs.uit.no or the freebsd =

name-variants mentioned earlier.

In summary, we can and are willing to make available a substantial amount=

of resources (bandwidth, diskspace and computing power) on the following
conditions:

1. It will generate traffic (from IPv4 or IPv6) to our network.
2. It will not require to much man-hours from our side to maintain.
3. You (?) need to give an estimate of the amount of required diskspace =

   (for planning purposes only and such).

I believe these conditions are not difficult to meet, right? Not a condit=
ion,
but what would be a nice addition to condition 1., is to get a DNS entry =
for
such a server in the netbsd domain for visibility sake. What we cannot of=
fer =

is a 99.9% or so availability guaruantee, for the simple reason that our
network is a research test-net. On the other hand, we do depend ourselves=
 on
our server for our daily work so we're a bit careful in how we treat it ;=
-}...

In addition, as I've been a happy user of NetBSD for quite some years now=
, =

I'd like it if we could contribute to the NetBSD project like this.

Feedback/guestimations especially on 1. and 3. appreciated...

Feico Dillema.
  --> no problem

Department of Computer Science
University of Troms=F8, Norway