[talk] NYC*BUG Climate Mirror and roll call

[Isaac (.ike) Levy]

Hi All,

Sorry for the cross-post, I won’t make a habit of it.

For the new Climate Mirror list, I wanted to brief folks as to what NYC*BUG (the NYC *BSD Users Group) is independently working on.

--
NYC*BUG is working to get a big NYC mirror in place for Climate Data:

[x] Colocation:
NYC*BUG has run a donated colo cabinet in NYC, donated by New York Internet, with many BSD/UNIX/Open Source projects in and out over the last 12 years.  We’ve currently got space, power, and excellent/flexible internet connectivity in place.  Power will obviously become a practical issue but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, and for now we have 2 redundant circuits to get us lit solid.

[x] Skilled Large Storage Operators:
NYC*BUG is filled with folks possessing advanced and practical experience building/maintaining large scale storage systems, with practical expertise in ZFS on FreeBSD.  For this effort, we already have a small group of capable admins scheming to get a large storage system up just for this climate data.
Additionally, I personally used to work at a public data company, and from that I am well versed in the practical challenges mirroring data from many government agencies.  In short, we certainly know what we’re getting ourselves into :)

[-] Server(s) Hardware:
Today we’re currently in the process of reaching out to various hardware vendors we have professional relationships with, trying to acquire at least one large server (24-48 SATA bays), as well as disks.  This is our last hurdle- and getting something simply "not too junky" donated is important, as our experiences with volunteerism in this area is that too-flaky or too-hackish hardware is extremely costly for volunteers time.
We are even collaborating with a vendor on the idea of arranging for individual contributors to donate 8Tb drives by purchasing one, just organizational work.

With that, by nature of our organization, we’re trying to keep our mirroring independent- plenty of cooks in our kitchen for sure- but if folks come across anyone who has hardware to donate, (or would buy hardware to donate), we have more than a decade of community experience to put it into practice and keep it online.

--
Additionally, some breakout discussions have come up around NYC*BUG to address various distributed techniques, to that many individuals can contribute slices of what they have, but we’re still all just hashing out different ideas, (no pun intended), and even Torrent based ideas require a complete base to get distributed as “shards” so speak.  So we’re focusing on that.

Please feel free to contribute ideas or suggestions to what we have above, and if you like any of our ideas, by all means take them and run with them in your environments!

Also, some of our operational progress/chatter as we continue will remain on NYC*BUG lists, to keep the noise down here.

Best,
.ike