[Nut-upsdev] NUT CI farm: New hosting needed from 2027
Ted Mittelstaedt
tedm at mittelstaedt.us
Sun Oct 11 04:51:23 BST 2026
I don't use a consumer IP account in my home I use a business account
with a /28 of public IPs.
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.
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?)
NUT is on github, isn't that the central source control hub?
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 xkcd: Dependency
<https://xkcd.com/2347/> One of these days I'm going to print that one
out on 11x17 and frame it and hang it in the office.
But, the COMMERCIAL software market is no better. Guess for a second
what I have been doing this weekend? I will tell you.
a half a century ago a commercial software developer created a backup
software named Backup Exec.
The interface is awful the most non-intuitive thing you can imagine.
But it has had one thing going for it that made it dominate. Restores
from it actually worked.
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.
Until this year.
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.
For a while, the "current" owner wasn't selling it at all.
Now they started selling it again. They proudly claim "backup exec is
once again for sale, contact this X fulfillment house for renewals"
I contacted that house because my employers yearly license for it expired.
That house said "thank you very much send us your last license so you
can prove you owned it" I did.
That house just replied and said "great. Well now you have to go over
to this OTHER fulfillment house owned by this OTHER company"
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.
So in a twinkling - my employers entire library of hard drives - years
and years of backup archives - just vanished. Poof. Completely unusable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ted
On 10/7/2026 9:05 AM, Jim Klimov wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Nut-upsdev mailing list
>> Nut-upsdev at alioth-lists.debian.net
>> https://alioth-lists.debian.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nut-upsdev
> _______________________________________________
> Nut-upsdev mailing list
> Nut-upsdev at alioth-lists.debian.net
> https://alioth-lists.debian.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nut-upsdev
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/nut-upsdev/attachments/20261010/ab79dfaa/attachment-0001.htm>
More information about the Nut-upsdev
mailing list