In December, I announced that the OSL would be relocating from our longtime home in Kerr B210 to Oregon’s State Data Center in Salem. I’m excited to share that we’ve made tremendous progress on this historic migration, and I’m pleased to announce a critical fundraising campaign to support this endeavor. Migration Progress: Halfway There Cart loaded with servers, ready to be installed in new racks

Earlier this year, I shared our “OSL Future” update, outlining the roadmap to build a more sustainable and resilient OSU Open Source Lab. A key part of that plan was finding a professional-grade physical home for our core infrastructure to replace the facility we’ve called home for the last two decades. Today, I am thrilled to announce a major milestone: The OSL is officially moving to Oregon’s State Data Center (SDC) in Salem, Oregon.

The OSU College of Engineering featured an article highlighting the Open Source Lab’s plans on moving forward after reaching stability following the funding crisis. Read the story here: https://engineering.oregonstate.edu/all-stories/strong-support-stabilizes-funding-open-source-lab.

Are you passionate about Linux and the open source community? Looking to gain hands-on experience in a real-world production environment? The Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) is hiring! We’re looking for an enthusiastic undergraduate student enrolled at a university in Oregon with at least one year remaining in their program. This is a unique opportunity to work with cutting-edge technology, contribute to open source projects, and be part of a team that supports the global open source ecosystem.

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.

Reflections on My Time at the Open Source Lab by Travis Whitehead Working at the Open Source Lab has been the highlight of my computer science experience at Oregon State University. It was just by chance that I came across a job listing for the OSL. I had never heard of the organization, and it certainly was not a factor in my decision to pursue computer science at Oregon State University.