Offering my servers to build FreeCAD, realthunder's fork and PRs

[Cyclonit]

It depends on how the builds are done. The servers currently run fedora minimal. Realthunder uses docker for his builds, so no issues there. I do not have licenses for Windows server or OSX though.

I am not familiar with the current setup, but I would go for a Jenkins or GitLab setup to support different repositories, branches etc.

[mnesarco]

Hi @Cyclonit your offer sounds very generous, one question: How stable is it? what happens if you decided to unplug the servers in few months? Changing infrastruture is very costly and time consuming, I think that if FreeCAD decided to move some infrastructure somewhere, the espectations are to maintan it for many years to come.

It will be very valuable to run transient tasks, builds, tests, store backups, mirrors, etc... but not to host critical assets.

It is just my oppinion.

[Cyclonit]

Hi @Cyclonit your offer sounds very generous, one question: How stable is it? what happens if you decided to unplug the servers in few months?

I do understand your concerns. To put it simply, as long as they are being put to good use, I have zero intention to shut them down. I have continuously rented servers for the past 7 years and either used them myself or hosted game servers for friends and family. Supporting FreeCAD would be a step up for sure, but I am fully comitted to my offer.

Changing infrastruture is very costly and time consuming, I think that if FreeCAD decided to move some infrastructure somewhere, the espectations are to maintan it for many years to come.

Regardless of my previous statement regarding my comitment, I suggest that any CI/CD pipeline should be built in such a way that it can easily be moved to other servers. Both for recovery and to allow reproducing results on other systems.

[Cyclonit]

ping

ping

Sorry for the ping, could you comment on this? Afaik you are the persons responsible for building FreeCAD and I'd like to know if you're interested in my offer or if it is not needed.

Kind regards
Cyclonit

[sgrogan]

pinged by pinger macro

pinged by pinger macro

What do you think?

I can think of some things we could do, linux only;
Build source documentation, need script
Build offline documentation and Merge with master (.qhh), need script
commit translations (.ts) to master

We wouldn't need to host anything, everything could be deployed elsewhere.

[looo]

What do you think?

Sorry for the ping, could you comment on this?

We are using azure for the conda-builds. To add builds of any branch we only have to create a fork of the feedstock (I tested this already). So actually azure doesn't have a lot of limitations.
Other things we talked about in the past:

- daily appimage:
build freecad + creating the appimage in one step (But in my eyes the weekly builds are a good compromise. If one wants faster updates, simple use the ppa or build freecad for yourself. If you want more stable freecad use the stable version (currently a problem as 0.19 is not yet released)

- storing old builds/appimages:
currently we have ~10gb of storage on anaconda.org. So we have to delete older builds. (For me this is not really an issue, as there is not much need for builds older than 3 months)

[Kunda1]

Other things we talked about in the past:

- daily appimage:
build freecad + creating the appimage in one step (But in my eyes the weekly builds are a good compromise. If one wants faster updates, simple use the ppa or build freecad for yourself. If you want more stable freecad use the stable version (currently a problem as 0.19 is not yet released)

- storing old builds/appimages:
currently we have ~10gb of storage on anaconda.org. So we have to delete older builds. (For me this is not really an issue, as there is not much need for builds older than 3 months)

Daily AppImages would be very very helpful for the 'compiling shy' power users which most likely would be the silent majority. If we could automate thi, it would be pretty awesome.

[jmaustpc]

Other things we talked about in the past:

- daily appimage:
build freecad + creating the appimage in one step (But in my eyes the weekly builds are a good compromise. If one wants faster updates, simple use the ppa or build freecad for yourself. If you want more stable freecad use the stable version (currently a problem as 0.19 is not yet released)

- storing old builds/appimages:
currently we have ~10gb of storage on anaconda.org. So we have to delete older builds. (For me this is not really an issue, as there is not much need for builds older than 3 months)

Daily AppImages would be very very helpful for the 'compiling shy' power users which most likely would be the silent majority. If we could automate thi, it would be pretty awesome.

I've been in contact with realthunder regarding building his fork more regularly.

I am not diminishing the generosity of this offer. It is likely very useful, is certainly generous and very much appreciated by me and no doubt many others.

However just to be clear as I have no doubt the OP would agree, this should only be used for transient data or possibly as a secondary/alternative/temporary back up of data that is also backed up elsewhere. Important, core, irreplaceable, project, confidential, data etc. should be run/stored on services in professional data centres and the like, where we can have confidence that hardware/software maintenance and reliability in general are appropriate. Where we are not vulnerable to the effects of one point of failure.


As we saw with Roland, even the best most well meaning can still be killed in a car accident.

[kkremitzki]

Sorry for the ping, could you comment on this? Afaik you are the persons responsible for building FreeCAD and I'd like to know if you're interested in my offer or if it is not needed.

Kind regards
Cyclonit

Hello, and firstly, thank you for the kind offer. Sorry for the delay in a response; there has been so much activity and people wanting to help after the F360 announcement, it's been great, but at the same time I feel bad in a sense because although I want to fully take advantage of all these offers, I'm not always able to.

Anyway, to get to the response, yes, that would be very useful indeed! From your restrictions, it seems like the servers would be fine to be used as non-public build machines and an archival site, and any build artifacts it produces would just need to be transferred elsewhere; this would be no problem.

I'll PM you a public key after I post this. I guess the only question I have, is there anything available in terms of out-of-band access? For example, previously someone offered us something like this, but it was inaccessible in a data center (the contributor had moved away from that continent) and at one point I broke it and never had it come back up after reboot.

[Cyclonit]

However just to be clear as I have no doubt the OP would agree, this should only be used for transient data or possibly as a secondary/alternative/temporary back up of data that is also backed up elsewhere. Important, core, irreplaceable, project, confidential, data etc. should be run/stored on services in professional data centres and the like, where we can have confidence that hardware/software maintenance and reliability in general are appropriate. Where we are not vulnerable to the effects of one point of failure.

Hi, thank you for the kind words and yes, you are correct. I consider these servers to be best suited for transient tasks or secondary backup for critical data. The servers are located in a professional datacenters, but they are not storage optimized.

Hello, and firstly, thank you for the kind offer. Sorry for the delay in a response; there has been so much activity and people wanting to help after the F360 announcement, it's been great, but at the same time I feel bad in a sense because although I want to fully take advantage of all these offers, I'm not always able to.

No worries you're doing a great job and good work. This matter is not time critical.

Anyway, to get to the response, yes, that would be very useful indeed! From your restrictions, it seems like the servers would be fine to be used as non-public build machines and an archival site, and any build artifacts it produces would just need to be transferred elsewhere; this would be no problem.

Correct.

I'll PM you a public key after I post this. I guess the only question I have, is there anything available in terms of out-of-band access? For example, previously someone offered us something like this, but it was inaccessible in a data center (the contributor had moved away from that continent) and at one point I broke it and never had it come back up after reboot.

There is out of band acces but I'll have to check if I can give you access to it. The servers are rented and I do not have physical access myself, but there is a management website for creating/reverting to snapshots and the likes. I am fine with exchanging contact data with you and/or other veterans of the project so you can reach me directly.

I'll set up your account tomorrow so you can check out the servers. What kind of a setup do you have in mind from a technical perspective?