Donate and make CentOS stronger
Contents
1. Resource and financial needs
The CentOS Project is entirely based on the efforts of volunteers. We rely on contributions and donations from CentOS users as well, for:
- Logistics related to promotion and infrastructure
- Specific hardware needs
- Bandwidth and connectivity
- Promotion material at conferences and exhibitions
- Organizing CentOS-related events
Please note: We are not able to accept financial donations directly to the project.
2. Donating things
We're round the globe presenting CentOS at conferences and Linux days and a couple of other events. If you want to spend some money on CentOS, there's always stuff we need for those events, like
- T-Shirts
- preprinted CD-Roms or DVD-Rs
- Mugs?
- USB sticks with the CentOS logo on there
- and so on (maybe you can think of something cool you'd like to be able to get at an event).
If you want to help out with something like that, feel free to contact us at donate@centos.org
3. Donating dedicated servers
If you would like to give something back to the CentOS Project and are considering a dedicated server donation, please contact us at: donate@centos.org Server donors are featured prominently (with a sponsor provided 468x60 banner) on our sponsors page and there is a Spotlight link (with a sponsor provided 240x60 banner) on the CentOS.org front page.
We use donated dedicated servers for many purposes, including the following:
- For CentOS DNS, mail, mailing list and web services.
- For distributing the base and updates CentOS trees to our external public mirrors.
As the 'announce' server for CentOS BitTorrent downloads and as seeds for our BitTorrent downloads.
- To maintain the archive of older CentOS content in the 'vault' and for additional staged hot backups.
- As infrastructure for management of the CentOS Project such as 'staging' and 'behind the scenes' internal uses
- For some of the larger and less available hardware (ia64, ppc(32), ppc64, s390, s390x, sparc, alpha, and such 'side architectures'), the CentOS Project have used donated servers as 'build' machines.
Here are the preferred specifications we need to use a dedicated machine:
Recent Intel and AMD physical machines ( supporting x86-64-v2 specs, aka grep sse4_2 /proc/cpuinfo)
> 4000GB drive (raid-1, 2x4000GB preferred, or higher : if using megaraid_sas or mpt3sas adapter, a recent one that would be supported by el9 kernel)
8GB RAM (>= 8GB preferred)
- Gbit/sec internet connection (with ipv6 connectivity, so dual-stack)
- a substantially unlimited outbound monthly bandwidth (we can easily average about 15TiB per machine currently per month on some machines)
- It can be set up with a minimal base install of the current 'latest' release, and either a password, or a ssh public key for root access send through that email address, and we will handle an initial audit/reinstall, and slotting into our management and monitoring framework from there
Note: The vast majority of our dedicated servers are in the USA (which we greatly appreciate ... and we can use more there). We have a great need for providers from Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and the Asia Pacific region to step up and donate dedicated servers as we now have an update system that can balance loads geographically.
Note: If you are an ISP and provide a dedicated server which we can use as a mirror, the CentOS project will manage that server. We will maintain it as an up to date mirror that your local CentOS machines can all use. The end result might be that your users get faster updates and in the end the total bandwidth consumed by doing CentOS updates for you actually goes down ... and of course, you get to support the OS that is making you all that money.
Note: Virtual machines are rarely up to the loads the project's uses can place upon them. However, if you can contribute something that you think is at par with the above mentioned performance level, we would be happy to test it. We might still be able to find use for them within the CentOS Infrastructure.
4. Donating public mirror services
If you are interested in providing a public CentOS mirror, please join the mirror mailing list, and consider: