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<p>I don't use a consumer IP account in my home I use a business
account with a /28 of public IPs.</p>
<p>During the summer my electric bill is higher paying for more air
conditioning. During the winter it is lower paying less money for
natural gas to run my furnace. It works out.</p>
<p>My server uptime at home is virtually the same as at my current
employer. (who shuts off power in their house when they go on
vacation?)</p>
<p>NUT is on github, isn't that the central source control hub?</p>
<p>As for orphaned open source projects - yes that is a tough one.
There are indeed Really Useful FOSS projects out there - the
software industry discusses this often - the textbook is <a
href="https://xkcd.com/2347/">xkcd: Dependency</a> One of
these days I'm going to print that one out on 11x17 and frame it
and hang it in the office.</p>
<p>But, the COMMERCIAL software market is no better. Guess for a
second what I have been doing this weekend? I will tell you.</p>
<p>a half a century ago a commercial software developer created a
backup software named Backup Exec.</p>
<p>The interface is awful the most non-intuitive thing you can
imagine.</p>
<p>But it has had one thing going for it that made it dominate.
Restores from it actually worked.</p>
<p>For the last 2 decades of my career in one form or another I've
used it with commercial clients. My current employer has run it
over a decade.<br>
</p>
<p>Until this year.</p>
<p>3 months ago while I was paying attention to much more important
things - Veritas, it's owner, unceremoniously went out of business
and was broken up for corporate scrap with bits and pieces of it
sold off here and there.</p>
<p>For a while, the "current" owner wasn't selling it at all.</p>
<p>Now they started selling it again. They proudly claim "backup
exec is once again for sale, contact this X fulfillment house for
renewals"</p>
<p>I contacted that house because my employers yearly license for it
expired.</p>
<p>That house said "thank you very much send us your last license so
you can prove you owned it" I did.</p>
<p>That house just replied and said "great. Well now you have to go
over to this OTHER fulfillment house owned by this OTHER company"</p>
<p>I haven't even gotten pricing on this yet. But if you think for
one second I'm going to spend a dime of my company's money on
another year of Backup Exec, a software package that the owner
doesn't want to even sell and fobbed off on another company which
that company doesn't even want to sell - you would be an insane
person.</p>
<p>So in a twinkling - my employers entire library of hard drives -
years and years of backup archives - just vanished. Poof.
Completely unusable.</p>
<p>Now MAYBE I can kick the Backup Exec product down the road one
more year - fork over zillions to a company that is better suited
to milking a cow on a farm than actually producing software - and
I strongly suspect that this milking company is hoping there's
enough IT Directors near enough to retirement that they will
indeed throw thousands to kick that can down the road another
year. But I am not yet morally corrupt enough to join that party.</p>
<p>So I am combing through the distributed open source backup
projects. I'll never use another commercial backup software
product again unless it's free windows backup. I'm not going to
get caught with my pants down a second time. Amanda at one time
used to be the cat's miaow and it has a sponsor now. I'm trying
out UrBackup though this weekend.<br>
</p>
<p>Jim, you are a great guy. Many people owe you a lot. But if you
were ever to be hit by that proverbial bus without arranging for
others to have commit rights on your github repo for NUT - it
would be forked quicker than grapes though a goose by some young
ambitious guy. And your entire build infrastructure would be
deleted in a few keystrokes by Amazon or whoever cloud provider is
hosting it.</p>
<p>Plus, the biggest value of NUT is it's support for all the weirdo
UPSes out there. But as I've observed, more and more UPSes are
using USB UPS HID. And the Big Three operating systems - MacOS,
Windows, and Ubuntu Desktop - have USB UPS HID drivers and rather
crude shutdown programs that ship with them and APIs that talk to
their drivers. These are toys compared to NUT - but they handle
graceful shutdown on power loss. And because they now ship with
the Big Three - it forces UPS makers to support that protocol -
which reinforces the Big Three to better support USB UPS HID. If
NUT disappeared tomorrow - the world would stagger forward on the
amateur hour stuff from the Big Three - but we wouldn't be
completely up the creek without a paddle.<br>
</p>
<p>I truly hope NUT gives you enjoyment to work on. apcupsd gives me
enjoyment to work on although it's much more of an intellectual
challenge to get it to build on newer OSes now. But the rational
thing is to work on this for your OWN enjoyment and pride. The
rest of the world might be using your stuff a lot - you definitely
won the "NUT vs apcupsd" war - although this was a much me
recognizing that FOSS was not being served by having the Coke and
Pepsi of FOSS backup softwares dividing the effort, and
engineering a gentle fade to black for apcupsd as your work so
that developers interested in UPS software would work on NUT - but
the world also has little loyalty and will switch to something
else if NUT disappeared. And since it's on github - it can't
disappear - even if you do.<br>
</p>
<p>Ted</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 10/7/2026 9:05 AM, Jim Klimov wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAJYg8vKhSMWi7m_mkx6HY1xJV02Pe73pz2bD8cbBqrHe0cdFaw@mail.gmail.com">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
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<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"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">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" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">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"
moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">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" moz-do-not-send="true">#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>
<fieldset></fieldset>
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