That's not how it generally works in the real world in my experience. Whenever an Ubuntu release happens it almost always puts our netwok links to the max. I can't imagine doubling that. A lot of people still download directly and don't bother with torrents.

If the plan to use a 1.5GB default image goes through that will wreck havoc on the mirroring network. That's essentially doubling the size of the default ISO and will likely cause for some annoyed users waiting for the download. They're doing it wrong if they can't fit it on a CD.

We use Ganeti + KVM at the OSUOSL with a completely open source stack. We can do live migration, fast deployment, easy horizontal scaling, and easy management. We haven't had any major issues with Ganeti itself only a few minor issues with KVM. Performance on KVM is still lagging compared to Xen but for what we use it for we've had no problems.

That predates me by quite a bit and had never heard that story before. I'm surprised John Sechrest never told it to me when he was still living in Corvallis. Its very interesting to hear that though! I will have to remember that the next time I give this presentation. Thanks!

Oh I agree. Its been quite frustrating not getting very far on our puppet migration. And it has been difficult to manage considering most of our help is from students whom we have to teach/mentor at the same time. I wish we could hire more full-time sysadmins but we simply don't have the money so we have to make due with what we have.

Indeed, tunneling IPv6 at our scale would be quite silly.

We've been using CFengine since nearly the day we started so we have a collection of CFengine recipes that go back 5-6 years. Its going to take a while to get everything in a state considering there's only one full-timer (me) and 4-6 undergraduate students. Granted we're working on just getting a bootstrap set of modules done first (which is almost completed). Additionally we're writing our modules so that they are reusable (which takes more time) for other people and plan to post them on puppetforge eventually.

Trying to work on that plus keep up on regular maintenance, new projects, misc fires, conferences, etc all adds up. We do a pretty good job of keeping up on tasks but we do fall behind sometimes. We take pride that we run a pretty tight ship and want to continue that moving forward.

You can see their bandwidth utilization here: http://ftpmap.osuosl.org/

Keep in mind that the Corvallis server is out of rotation currently because of some hardware issues.

What's funny is we sometimes get abuse emails from ISP's complaining that we are DOS'ing them when in fact its their users just using our mirrors.

No I hadn't. Thanks for the tip! We'll certainly check it out and see how viable it is.

The project you saw at OSCON was called RAIV (Rack And Inventory Viewer). Unfortunately it ran into a dead-end and is currently vapor-ware. Currently we're using an internal CakePHP webapp for basic inventory and customer tracking, but its very buggy and lacks many features.

We are in the midst of working on a completely new project that will cover many of the problems mentioned in this article and beyond. Think of it like an open source datacenter management webapp and backend. Its still in the planning stages, but the intent is to have a plugin based system where you can use the inventory plugin, DNS/DHCP plugin (to replace maintain), virtualization management (deployment and console access), etc all in one interface. The idea is to create an admin interface and a customer interface so that they can access and see information about their environment. We're far from having a demoed project but we hope to have something soon.

Hey, don't be dissing Lars. I've met him and he is a really cool guy!