<div dir="ltr"><div>Well, in this matter, it is not so much about being bigoted - I've run servers for decades too, at home and elsewhere. It is rather about being rational.</div><div><br></div><div>Here the cloud gives a degree of independence for the project, as in "the maintainer can change and the infrastructure remains". It is much more complicated with hardware bought with contributed funds and may have to be shipped across the world to a new maintainer, if I were to be hit by a bus.</div><div><br></div><div>If anything else, these "somebody else's machines" run for months and years in a row while the ones in my home are more often down (e.g. if I leave for vacation and shut down the power and water in the house, or if the family complains about the fans at night and the extra heat source in the summer).</div><div><br></div><div>While build agents are welcome to dial in and partake in the build farm, like the machines hosted in my home do, the central point is much more highly available for incoming pull requests at any time, with a persistent IP address and allowed incoming connections (which is another problem with consumer ISPs, I had different track record with different providers about this) for web-hooks or contributor access.</div><div><br></div><div>Part of the point however was to find yet another sponsored FOSS-friendly hosting, like Travis, FOSSHOST and Digital Ocean across the past decade. So it is not about "being conned into paying someone" either, almost rather the opposite ;)<br><br></div><div>Jim</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Oct 7, 2026 at 1:48 PM Ted Mittelstaedt via Nut-upsdev <<a href="mailto:nut-upsdev@alioth-lists.debian.net">nut-upsdev@alioth-lists.debian.net</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>For the last 20+ years I have hosted 8 servers in my home, and
run a "cloud" business off of them. (email and web hosting)</p>
<p>Although the glory days of that are past (it's now mainly for my
own amusement since I'm no longer actively marketing that business
it's just not that profitable anymore) the simple fact is that you
are being bigoted and looking down your nose at "maintainers
homes" and this "home office" spouting.<br>
</p>
<p>For 20 years my home was "the cloud" for many customers most
businesses. Still is for some.</p>
<p>People's perceptions are that "the cloud" is this magical
mystical thing. It is not. It is hardware, electricity, power,
cooling, buildings, telco cabling and everything. There is
absolutely no difference between a data farm in the podunk sticks
in California and a bunch of servers in it than the basement of
your house you live in other than size.</p>
<p>Remember what Yoda said:</p>
<p>"Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm?
And well you should not. For my ally is the Internet, and a
powerful ally it is."</p>
<p>"The Cloud" is everywhere these days. There is actually no
difference really between the PC you are typing on and any other
PC on the Internet. Your PC could be hosting a webserver right
now under your nose and you might not even know it, (assuming you
have secure boot disabled and someone put a rootkit on it)</p>
<p>I was an employee of Central Point Software back in 1993 when
they first "connected to the Internet" a 9600bps Telebit
Trailblazer modem to UUnet. I spent a decade prior to that in the
dialup BBS scene. At one time there were BBS networks with
hundreds to maybe thousands of nodes - all in "people's home
offices" this was 40 years ago. And they were tied together with
networking that was crude compared to what we have today, running
on PC's that had a thousandth of the power of a junked OpenWRT
router in a Goodwill bin somewhere.</p>
<p>You have completely swallowed the KoolAid here with this notion
that you have to PAY MONEY to a "cloud service provider" You and
all maintainers are "cloud service providers" to each other - or
could be with a little effort and a copy of pfsense and a
discarded PC with 2 NICs in it that can act as a VPN server and
router for your "home office" network. These cloud service
providers might be big and wealthy and have large buildings but
they are giving you barely a sliver of this a meager grudgingly
small slice. And the fact that they are starting to pull in their
horns and aren't handing out free stuff anymore just means more
and more businesses are copping wise to this and asking the
obvious question "I'm forking over $10k in space rent &
utilities a month for my office I'm forking over $500 a month in
fiber connection fees why the HELL do I need to pay a cloud
provider when I can just have a server HERE"</p>
<p>The Internet didn't start with a giant network of datacenters
across the country. It started small in thousands of labs in
thousands of closets across the world.</p>
<p>Un-learn what you have been conned into believing by datacenter
companies who just want to take your money, "the cloud" is just a
phrase they invented to con people into paying for what they could
do themselves. "The Cloud" started half a century ago in 1976 when
Mike Lesk at Bell Labs wrote UUCP and hooked it up between Bell
Labs facilities. It has always been with us and was NOT invented
by Amazon and Google.<br>
</p>
<p>Ted<br>
</p>
<div>On 10/1/2026 12:30 AM, Jim Klimov via
Nut-upsdev wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>Hello all, (also posted as <a href="https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/issues/3725" target="_blank">https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/issues/3725</a>)</div>
<div>
<p dir="auto">Things are good while they last, but...
DigitalOcean announced that they will be sun-setting the
effort that allowed us to host the NUT CI farm core in their
infrastructure:</p>
<blockquote>
<p dir="auto">We’re reaching out to share an important
update regarding the DigitalOcean Open Source Credits
Program.</p>
<p dir="auto">DigitalOcean has decided to sunset the Open
Source Credits Program. As part of this change, we are no
longer accepting new credit applications or approving
credit renewals, extensions, or additional credit
requests.</p>
<p dir="auto">If you currently have Open Source Credits that
have already been granted, those credits will continue to
be honored according to their existing terms and
conditions. No action is required for your existing credit
allocation.</p>
<p dir="auto">Additionally, the dedicated inbox for the Open
Source Credits Program will stop being monitored as part
of this transition. For any further questions or
assistance, please submit your inquiries through our
standard support channel: <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/company/contact/support" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.digitalocean.com/company/contact/support</a></p>
<p dir="auto">We appreciate your participation in the
DigitalOcean Open Source Credits Program and the work you
do to support the open source community. Thank you for
being part of the program.</p>
<p dir="auto">Best wishes, ...</p>
</blockquote>
<p dir="auto">We have roughly until April 2027 to find a new
hoster for our VMs with Jenkins and a number of uncommon
operating systems (illumos, *BSD, many generations of Linux
containers) to continue ensuring cross-platform and
cross-decade portability of NUT. While duplicates for most
of these build agents exist in maintainers' homes, it is our
belief that at least the core build orchestration and
logging server (and ideally at least one of each kind of its
agents) should be out there in the cloud, independent of any
one's home office.</p>
<p dir="auto">This mailing thread or issue <a href="https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/issues/3725" target="_blank">#3725</a> will help us collect
pointers (or offers) about sponsored hosting that would pick
us up. Community members, please feel welcome to chime in!</p>
<p dir="auto">Notes from technical experience starting with
Fosshost and technical+financial with DigitalOcean, where
this amounted to cca $300/month with existing usage:</p>
<ul dir="auto">
<li>OpenIndiana (also hosting Jenkins): public IPv4(+IPv6?)
address, 500Gb+ storage, 8+GB RAM, 6+ cores; storage
controller support was picky (in ProxMox): MegaRAID SAS
8708EM2 worked, and some I/O latency reservation was
needed for ZFS to not give up on the disk pool when their
host was busy; interaction with DigitalOcean QEMU was okay
on storage side, but it took cca 2 hours in
shutdown/reboot scenarios to softly go from "Halting
system" to actually off - in case of maintenance, had to
"Turn off" externally</li>
<li>Linux (with many native and qemu containers): 500Gb+
storage, 4+GB RAM, 8+ cores; storage controller: virtio
SCSI</li>
<li>OmniOS: 100Gb storage, 3GB RAM, 4+ cores; storage
controller support was picky (in ProxMox): MegaRAID SAS
8708EM2 worked</li>
<li>FreeBSD: 150Gb storage, 3GB RAM, 4+ cores; storage
controller: virtio SCSI</li>
<li>OpenBSD: 150Gb storage, 3GB RAM, 4+ cores; storage
controller: IDE (maybe SATA or virtio would work too)</li>
<li>If it would be possible to get more VMs to test more OS
distributions and/or releases (e.g. latest and less recent
BSDs), or get some native non-x86 environments, to make
sure NUT remains compatible with what people have deployed
in reality - that would be awesome!</li>
</ul>
Jim Klimov</div>
<div><br>
</div>
</div>
<br>
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