Donation Drive – Build infrastructure repair and capacity expansion

August 15, 2012 by 5 Comments

Thanks to all of you, Fuduntu has seen phenomenal growth.  Fuduntu is now believed to be installed on over 30,000 computers worldwide.  This is an excellent achievement for our small project!  To support our growth a lot of important changes had to be made to our hosting infrastructure and to other areas of the project which have hit our budget really hard this year.  To ensure that we are able to sustain our current growth rate and to budget for the future we need to ask for your help in terms of monetary donations.

Earlier this year we held a fundraiser that reached its goal of absorbing the expense of migrating to ELDnet.  We raised enough money to cover the first year of hosting, in just a few days.

Unfortunately, our 64bit build host is beginning to show signs of failure, as it has shown very erratic behavior over the last two days ranging from just powering off to flashing error codes via all connected IO devices when powered on (when it does this it does not complete POST and begin booting). This system will need immediate repair or replacement. Without repair, once it fails completely we will be unable to continue to provide updates or installation media for the 64bit edition of Fuduntu.

Also, due to our significant and unexpected growth this year, our primary package server – packages.fuduntu.org hosted at ELDnet has already nearly reached capacity.

To repair or replace our critical 64bit build host, increase capacity of our package delivery service, and also ensure we are able to keep the project financially stable, we need your help. Our goal is to fund the project’s basic needs through 2014, expand our package delivery capacity, and refresh our build infrastructure to increase our build capacity.  To achieve this goal, we are going to need to significantly increase our funding.

Remember, Fuduntu is managed by a team of volunteers that donate thousands of hours per year to build an operating system that is free for everyone to download and use. We don’t mind bearing this burden, as long as it is financially viable to build and distribute this free product.

Our budgetary requirements to optimally finance operations and maintenance at Fuduntu through 2014 is estimated at approximately $6,000.

This money will allow us to refresh our build farm, add capacity to our package delivery service, help fund test equipment to help us test the software we are delivering to you, and keep the lights on through 2014. In addition it allows for a small amount of our budget to be set aside in the event of of another critical system failure like the one we’ve had today.

As a user of Fuduntu you directly benefit from a financial donation to our project, as it helps us continue to be prepared to support you as we grow. Your net benefit is quite simply the future of the Fuduntu product that you use and love.

Support Fuduntu:



Even if you are able to provide a financial donation to the project, please consider disabling adblock on our websites. The use of adblock greatly reduces our secondary source of funding which impacts Fuduntu financially.

Below you will find some examples of how your donations have been and will continue to be used to support Fuduntu.

Hosting

Currently, Fuduntu has a relationship with two hosting providers ELDnet, and Linode. These companies provide VDS and VPS servers for various components of the Fuduntu project.

We also have multiple partners who graciously donate space on their mirrors to our project.

Our primary package server – web001.fuduntu.org is near capacity. This server is currently averaging 1.7TB of traffic monthly and trending upwards as our user base increases. Within the next two months we will be at or will exceed capacity with our provider. To proactively accommodate for this growth, the project must add a second VDS and spread package requests across nodes.

Recently, the team moved all of our websites away from Dreamhost to a new VPS hosted with Linode bringing with it an incredible performance boost. Our first year expense was small thanks to a donation of a few months of hosting by Linode, however the project will incur an annual expense for hosting with this new provider.

Build Environment

Our current build environment consists of a router / firewall, and a pair of dual core computers dedicated to building software using local storage and NFS. This configuration was sufficient for package management when we only had one or two people building software, when we were working on one or two packages at a time. Now that we have a few more packagers and we are moving packages through our build service at a much faster rate – it isn’t able to keep up with the demand anymore.

For example, building LibreOffice 3.6 required 6 hours of build time per server. During this period of time the servers were at 100% capacity and couldn’t be used to build anything else. It is a similar scenario for other large packages including the Linux kernel, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Chromium.

Another problem with this configuration, and the scenario we are currently facing is that if one of these systems fails we will be unable to build software for that platform for the duration of time that the system is down – as one is dedicated to 32bit builds, and the other 64bit builds.

Currently, our 64bit build server has had a critical failure and requires immediate repair or replacement. As it stands there is currently no funding available to repair or replace this host.

Instead of replacing or repairing the 64bit build host I would like to re-engineer the build environment to be more architecture agnostic and support our current growth pattern. To accommodate this new design, the project needs a bastion host, a switch, four new build hosts, and a NAS.

Project expenses

In addition to our web hosting and package service requirements, there are a lot of other expenses related to developing and hosting a Linux distribution ranging from needing test gear to keeping the lights on. The project currently has no test equipment with ATI and Nvidia graphics hardware so our testing is constrained to equipment with Intel video and only a small range of WIFI adapters.

Thank you in advance for choosing to support our project. Your direct support helps Fuduntu thrive.

Fuduntu Website – Fuduntu.org
Fuduntu Community – Fuduntu Forum
Distrowatch – Fuduntu
IRC: #fuduntu @ Freenode

Download: 2012.3 – 32Bit: [ Download | Torrent ] 64Bit: [ Download | Torrent ]

SHA1 sums:

32bit: 9bfac58127d3d266b36ecac78c588d674287a697
64bit: 55f497bb729e2c31e4d5b7bc7a47a3af13d45d93

Filed under Expenses, Fuduntu, Hosting Tagged with

  • http://www.fewt.com/ Fewt

    Donation update: The project has received 4 contributions our first day totaling $240. There is a long road ahead to reach our goal of $6,000 but with your help we can get there!

    As a Fuduntu user, you directly benefit from helping us improve how we build and deliver! Also, help get the word out by sharing this link and asking community news sites to help spread the word!

  • http://www.fewt.com/ Fewt

    Donation update: The project has received 1 contribution today bringing our fundraiser collection to a total of $250.

    This leaves us $5,750 short of our $6,000 goal. Without your help we will not be able to improve our build service, or add the needed capacity to our package delivery service.

    Remember, these critical components are vital to the projects future. Without funding, we will be forced to reduce, throttle, or halt some of the services that the project currently provides to the community.

    More than 2,000 Fuduntu users connected to our stable package repository today to check for updates. If only 1/2 of those users were to donate the minimum amount requested – we would far exceed our goal.

  • http://www.fewt.com/ Fewt

    Donation update: The project has received 5 financial contributions today bringing our fundraiser collection to a total of $345.

    In addition, one of our team members has offered to donate a server and dedicated hosting to the project, which we have graciously accepted. This 8 core server with 8GB of memory and a 1TB RAID 1 array offers sufficient capacity to replace our entire build farm. This server will be used to host virtual machines building software for the our 32bit and 64bit platforms.

    This single donation helps reduce our projects needs by roughly $3,000.

    In addition, this donation allows us to direct our current fundraiser collection to the second virtual dedicated server to share package traffic keeping our primary node under 2TB of package transfers per month.

    We aren’t out of the woods yet though, we would still love to be able to fund the project through 2014, purchase equipment to test ATI and NVidia gear – and hold sufficient funds to recover from a catastrophic failure like we experienced this week – without having to hold a fundraiser. To date, we are still over $2,000 short of reaching that goal.

    If you are a Fuduntu user that hasn’t yet donated, please consider taking a minute to help support the project.

  • http://twitter.com/nipsen nipsen

    Tsch. Didn’t even know there was a donation drive going on. lol.

    Sounds good if you could manage to get some better tested nvidia/ati support going, along with bumblebee/optimus support. That would lower the threshold a bit to get 3d graphics, blender, games, and so on, working.

    Imo, might be an idea to look into making the default themes and layout choices scale more easily to different resolutions. Or at least be conscious about that when setting things up. WIth fonts and borders, that sort of thing. Whether it’s tablets or hd screens, that you could get a very good result by scaling up and down based on resolution and size, etc..

    With the multimedia foundation, support for multiple monitors through compiz might also be an idea to have easily set up from the beginning. Have some way to detect monitors and add a reference to compiz automatically?

  • ernani463

    Gave my few coins,

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