Following our OSL Future post, the community response has been incredible! Thanks to your amazing support, our team is funded for the next year. This is a huge relief and lets us focus on building a truly self-sustaining OSL. To get there, we’re tackling two big interconnected goals: Finding a new, cost-effective physical home for our core infrastructure, ideally with more modern hardware. Securing multi-year funding commitments to cover all our operations, including potential new infrastructure costs and hardware refreshes. Pillar 1: The Data Center & Hardware Challenge Our current data center is over 20 years old and needs to be replaced soon. With Oregon State University evaluating the future of this facility, it’s very likely we’ll need to relocate in the near future. While migrating to the State of Oregon’s data center is one option, it comes with significant new costs. This makes finding free or very low-cost hosting (ideally between Eugene and Portland for ~13-20 racks) a huge opportunity for our long-term sustainability. More power-efficient hardware would also help us shrink our footprint.

I am writing to inform you about a critical and time-sensitive situation facing the Open Source Lab (OSL). Over the past several years, we have been operating at a deficit due to a decline in corporate donations. While the Oregon State College of Engineering (CoE) has generously filled this gap, recent changes in university funding makes our current funding model no longer sustainable. As a result, our current funding model is no longer sustainable.

We are excited to announce a major upgrade to our OpenPOWER cluster, which will greatly benefit our open source projects. In collaboration with IBM, we have successfully integrated POWER10 capabilities into our current OpenPOWER cluster, powered by OpenStack using KVM on PowerVM. This enhancement represents a significant step forward in our commitment to providing cutting-edge resources to the open-source community supporting the POWER ecosystem. A Leap in Computing Power: POWER10 POWER10, IBM’s latest processor architecture, is designed to deliver a significant leap in performance, efficiency, and security. It represents a new era of computing, addressing the ever-growing demands of modern applications. By introducing POWER10, we ensure that our projects have access to state-of-the-art technology, facilitating improved performance and innovation on the POWER platform.

Service(s) affected FTP mirroring service which includes (but not limited to) the following hostnames: ftp.osuosl.org ftp2.osuosl.org ftp-chi.osuosl.org ftp-nyc.osuosl.org ftp-osl.osuosl.org rsync.osuosl.org rsync2.osuosl.org Reason for outage We will upgrade all three servers’ operating system from CentOS 7 to AlmaLinux 8. Unfortunately, due to an issue with how the disks were partitioned, we are unable to do in-place upgrades. This will require to do a full reinstall including re-syncing all of the FTP content on each system after reinstallation. The re-sync will likely take multiple days due to the size of the content.

My first Linux operating system was Ubuntu 10.04, when I was still young. It was my first experience with open-source software, which I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. I just wanted an operating system to work on my Dell hand-me-down computer and didn’t want to pay for windows. So, Linux was the first thing I found. Over the next few years I started to really appreciate open-source software. I realized its importance for the internet and myself since it was one of the only things that allowed me to have full control over my devices.