[Nut-upsdev] NUT CI farm: New hosting needed from 2027

Wed Oct 7 17:05:23 BST 2026

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.

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.

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).

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.

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 ;)

Jim

On Wed, Oct 7, 2026 at 1:48 PM Ted Mittelstaedt via Nut-upsdev <
nut-upsdev at alioth-lists.debian.net> wrote:

>
> 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)
>
> 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.
>
> For 20 years my home was "the cloud" for many customers most businesses.
> Still is for some.
>
> 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.
>
> Remember what Yoda said:
>
> "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."
>
> "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)
>
> 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.
>
> 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"
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Ted
> On 10/1/2026 12:30 AM, Jim Klimov via Nut-upsdev wrote:
>
> Hello all,  (also posted as
> https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/issues/3725)
>
> 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:
>
> We’re reaching out to share an important update regarding the DigitalOcean
> Open Source Credits Program.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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: https://www.digitalocean.com/company/contact/support
>
> 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.
>
> Best wishes, ...
>
> 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.
>
> This mailing thread or issue #3725
> <https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/issues/3725> will help us collect
> pointers (or offers) about sponsored hosting that would pick us up.
> Community members, please feel welcome to chime in!
>
> Notes from technical experience starting with Fosshost and
> technical+financial with DigitalOcean, where this amounted to cca
> $300/month with existing usage:
>
>    - 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
>    - Linux (with many native and qemu containers): 500Gb+ storage, 4+GB
>    RAM, 8+ cores; storage controller: virtio SCSI
>    - OmniOS: 100Gb storage, 3GB RAM, 4+ cores; storage controller support
>    was picky (in ProxMox): MegaRAID SAS 8708EM2 worked
>    - FreeBSD: 150Gb storage, 3GB RAM, 4+ cores; storage controller:
>    virtio SCSI
>    - OpenBSD: 150Gb storage, 3GB RAM, 4+ cores; storage controller: IDE
>    (maybe SATA or virtio would work too)
>    - 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!
>
> Jim Klimov
>
>
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