Notes on the CentOS Infrastructure
1. Team
There have been various people associated with the infra team, at the moment its :
2. Contacting US
The best and most effective way to get in touch with us is to drop into the irc channel #centos-devel on Libera.chat. You can get more details about the various CentOS irc channels at irc. Please don't email, call or get in touch with people using their personal details
3. The Infrastructure
The entire CentOS infrastructure is made up of donated hardware, either hosted at the donor's own facility or hosted with a further colo donor. These donors are a critical part of CentOS, and we thank them for their continued support of the project. If you would like to donate a server to us, refer to the donor details page at https://wiki.centos.org/Donate/ for configurations and network requirements.
Its important to note that these machines are run from within the .centos.org domain and are not considered as a part of the external mirror network. You can get a list of all external mirrors at https://www.centos.org/download/mirrors/.
The centos.org machines are used for:
- Msync: The msync network of machines are used by the external mirrors to get CentOS packages and stay updated. Consider these as the pillar machines that the entire centos mirror network ( internal and external ) rely on.
Debuginfo: The machines where http://debuginfo.centos.org/ is hosted
Vault: The machines that host the http://vault.centos.org/ site
Development: Some of the donated machines are used as development box's where we host development repositories ( like https://dev.centos.org/ ) and other development related work like the SIG wiki's and code repositories
- Testing and qa: We also use some of the machines in a testing role where we will test packages, technologies and tools.
We host our own torrent tracker ( http://torrent.centos.org:6969 ) to distribute isos and new releases. We also run a few torrent seeds on high speed links so that users are able to get reasonable torrent speeds.
Websites: We need to host our websites as well! Including https://www.centos.org/, https://wiki.centos.org/, https://bugs.centos.org/,
Mail and list services: As a support mechanism we manage and run various mailing lists ( https://lists.centos.org ), and with the very high volume of traffic that passes through these lists, we need dedicated machines to run such services.
- DNS and Mirrorlist management services are run off the donated machines too!
- Backups for various services. This is a specially tricky task for us to manage, as donors will come and go but we need to always make sure there is enough redundancy in the overall network.
- Infrastructure services like monitoring of other services, management tools and automation software.
- Its not uncommon to have machines switch roles based on project requirements at any given time.
Having said this, a large number of the donated machines also run a local CentOS mirror. Donors who have multiple machines hosted within the same data center as the donated machine are advised to use the local machine as their yum mirror. We usually try and maintain at-least one such machine at each hosting-industry related donor facility. As a donor, if this is something you are concerned about, do let us know. Also if there are any specific services you would prefer we did not run from your donated machines, let us know in that case as well, and we will try to accommodate it as much as possible.
4. FAQ's
Here are answers to some questions we get asked often.
What kind of machines is the project looking for? Take a look at the specs mentioned at https://wiki.centos.org/Donate for details
- How much bandwidth does a machine use up every month? That depends a lot on the sort of role the machine gets deployed into. In most cases a 2.5 TiB/month allocation is plenty. We do ask that the link be 100mbps or better, so that we can burst data through.
As a donor, do I get banners on the centos website? Yes, look at the https://www.centos.org/sponsors page for details including sizes
5. Mirrors
We are rethinking the way we do mirroring at the moment. All about this process can be found on this page