On substitutes and donating hosting to Guix

[Jing Luo]

Hi all,

I would like to share my computing resources with Guix developers and 
users, but I don't know which option is the best. (<--- share: per 
gratis)

I am the admin of repo.jing.rocks, which is already the mirror for many 
distros. There are three servers behind repo.jing.rocks (as well as my 
other self-hosted services), all of which are in my bedroom/living room 
- I own the hardware (mostly second hand). The physical location is 
Tokyo, Japan, with 10Gbps internet. All are powered by renewable energy 
and keep me warm in the winter (or boiling in the summer).

As a substitute: this option looks easy? Although the setup requires 
more than just a rsync cronjob (like other distros), and I'm not 
familiar with Guile (still learning). I got the guix-publish service 
running, but I don't know what to do next: how do I make it serve other 
clients? [1] is not clear about this, I think I should pull archives 
from ci.guix so that I don't have to build 30,000 packages myself, but 
probably not rsync?

"Donate"[2] option: this page mentions "We are also looking for 
donations of hardware and optionally hosting". Does "donating hardware" 
mean that I have to send my expensive machine(s) to Guix Foundation in 
Europe? Not only it would be unsafe, and then other distros would no 
longer be able to use it. If only joining the build farm without 
transferring the ownership of the hardware is allowed, then I'm eager to 
help, but please point me to the right direction. Here are the specs:

Server A: AMD EPYC 7773X x2, 100~200GB available RAM for Guix (total 
1TB), about 15TB available spinning rust storage (RAIDz3).
Server B: AMD EPYC 75F3, 64GB available RAM (total 512GB), about 5TB 
available Nvme storage (RAIDz2).
Server C: Intel Core i9-10900K, only 16GB available RAM (total 128GB 
non-ECC), less than 1TB available Nvme storage (RAID1) sharing with the 
boot drive, but can always NFS mount server A and B.
Server D?: a Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB for aarch64 or armhf builds. NFS mount 
storage will have to do.

Planned:
Server E*: a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB for aarch64 or armhf builds. It's 
backordered, ETA late Jan or early Feb
Server F**: for 100% free: ppc64le, I plan to purchase a Talos II 
motherboard, but I'm still saving money (need $5000 more). no ETA, it 
could take 12~18 months to save up that much money.

Another option would be I run a build farm with all of the above. But 
again, that may be too much for one person to maintain, I don't have the 
skills (yet) and I have a day job that's killing me. Please advise.

PS: please update page [2]: fosshost is dead, I saw it in the news.

[1] https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Guix/Mirrors
[2] https://guix.gnu.org/en/donate/

All the best and happy hecking,

--
Jing Luo
About me: https://jing.rocks/about/
PGP Fingerprint: 4E09 8D19 00AA 3F72 1899 2614 09B3 316E 13A1 1EFC

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