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Free Open Source Developer Storage advice
As some of you know, FOSSVPS has been giving free VMs to deserving Open Source developers.
While I am a developer I do have my own storage system so I would like your thoughts on
Providing a free low power VM giving access (via sshfs) to 256G+ disk.
Obviously people would want it (because it is free), but would it really be of benefit to the community or would it just be abused?
Comments
Abused
Thanks for doing this. I think this is too much for a free offer and unlike compute this is very risky and more likely to get abused.
Unless you can verify their true identity or establish a strong association with their account, the absence of mandatory penalties or screening mechanisms is highly likely to be abused (if the intentions are not entirely pure).
I could drop the small Vm and just host the space using s3 or rsync type access, but definitely not https because of what could be hosted (abused).
Agreed - we already have a pretty 'strong' manual authorisation system for our free VM service. One thing I don't like the idea of is 'scanning' user files, which of course is potentially a problem. This space is supposed to only be for Open Source (white hat) developers who FOSSVPS want to help. Which is why I asked for help on this subject.
You can ask @beanman109 who has been hosting a similar project - Lex.st - for years, offering 150GB of free storage and other cool stuff for devs. Signups were restricted to veteran and active forum members and it looks like he’s doing just fine
The idea sounds pretty good (in theory), but honestly, if you offer a relatively large amount of free storage, most people won't use it for open-source projects, but rather for backups, disguised torrents, or other things you don't want cluttering your infrastructure.
I would limit the offer, prohibiting general use of free storage, implementing basic monitoring to prevent abuse, and restricting it to verified developers or active projects.
If you leave it completely open, maybe 90% of it will be used for things that don't contribute anything. With a small filter, it could still be useful for people who actually store projects.
@Proxysolid Appreciate the comments.
Rather than giving a low power VPS, we could just give sshfs access. The 'client' would have to share the files via their server etc. As I also mentioned, we do have a pretty strong filtering system for a free VPS which we could use for storage requests.
I would not want to scan clients data.
While I generally support privacy rights of the individual/user, in this particular circumstance, given the fact that its intended use is for open source projects, all of the data should be open to the public for contributions, at least to my mind.
Very good point - something I had not considered.
Trouble is working out what could be 'naughty'.
i have been giving away vm's on my machines, mini pcs, raspberry pis, arduinos, storage space, vm's i won from racknerds BF, bought a bunch of domains for people, spent hours and hours teaching people, im still paying for cpanel account from my reseller (i dont even use myself lol) for people, not to mind countless free it support, countless code review.... etc etc
tl;dr; it's annoying to figure out who deserves, who does not, i have been doing this for uh, a long time. both for online friends and random people i meet and offline friends. so far, never gotten in trouble.
@DeadlyChemist I feel your pain. So what is your motivation, for me it is to progress the Open Source community and to promote the very supportive generous donors.
not sure, i like teaching/helping
from the, fuck knows how many people i thought/helped, made some good friends on the way, some people now work in IT as well.
but yeah, beeing kind gets abused fast
@DeadlyChemist - we could 'work' together with FOSSVPS?
depends, im not looking to dump money/provide services to compleate randoms (my stuff is not automated, or thought thru, so probably could be exploited to cause me hard/headaches...)
what i can offer is my expertise, teach some people
usually younger folks that well, don't have credit card/paypal and or live in countries where ressources are limited (crappy school etc)
so yeah, expertise, coding, ideas, project starters etc.
It's entirely possible to host stuff via another machine and serve the content via sshfs/mounted rclone.
As much as I would love storage I think it's very hard to accomplish this in a safe and feasible manner if you want any free time left at all (considering what you already do for FOSSVPS, which I am thankful for).
But of course I would love to be wrong about that.
@DeadlyChemist replied via PM.
Yes, that was one of the reasons I was suggesting sshfs to seperate data from serving. FOSSVPS has become 'automated' with some manual monitoring. So the reason for this post is to consider the next step.
If we just provide sshfs the main monitoring will be bandwidth and that can be automated......
Hope you are enjoying your VPS
I think you misunderstood me (or I am misunderstanding you, hah).
As long as sshfs is possible, one can just mount that on another computer and use as webroot. But as you said, checking the data consumption every now and then should hopefully be enough to at least eliminate the possibility of someone doing such things.
I very much am, would be cool if this also became a thing hah. Any plans on a control panel perhaps? ;D
Hi,
i am sorry, but what dev needs 256G+ disk space?
Most probably i am just too old school and make my life unnecessary hard to develop most code myself without side loading 2 mio. libs just to save some lines of own code / time but what is a dev doing with so much space?
Are libs nowadays just 20GB of size and you need to load them? How big will be your compiled application? Size of a game with 100G? ^^;
A serious dev will not have 2000 projects at the same time. And usually commits are delta's and not fully copies of the whole code.
So where is this all space consume coming from?
And if not that much space is required.... maybe just reducing the space to something that is realistically used by dev's will prevent things to be too hard abused...
Linux uhm ISOs.
Hi,
thank you for your idea! For very specific projects you might generate an ISO if you develop an OS or something so users could test/use your work. But you will hardly need 250G space for that i think.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Linux+ISO
I find @msatt's intention wonderful, but
I think, @layer7 put it quite well, too.
If you still want to do it I suggest to "turn it around" and only make it known among people you already know and trust (plus highly likely divide the space into e.g. 10 slices of 25 GB each).
Thanks guys - this is exactly the sort of comments I was hoping for.
I do genuinely want to help the community and do have disk capacity. I agree, why would devs need so much space.
@jsg @layer7 your comments are certainly appreciated.
So would it be fair to say the Open Source community have alternative storage sources and FOSSVPS should be focusing on other areas e.g. using the space for a beneficial (safe) application?
Hi,
i would agree to what already has been mentioned.
Search for something you know / somehow trust.
Maybe you are using in your company some software from an open source project? Offer them something...
Or maybe you know/saw a project that is cool? Offer them something...
Yes, there is no lack of free resources and yes again, FOSSVPS should be focusing on other areas e.g. using the space for a beneficial (safe) application.
Yes and no. Yes, but: do not offer but rather try to identify need ... and only then respond.
Abused and kept for backups and other irrelevant stuff. Free file hosting isnt exactly profitable
We are definitely not looking for profit, we are looking for benefit to the community.
sponsors are providing the hardware for free and we are providing our time for free. 
If we charged I am sure we would have considerably less problems !!!
Our
Now it sounds like all we are going to get are abusers. Why the fu.k can't people grow up and stop exploiting something that is free (steps back waiting for all the usual comments)