Tadgy

I've sent a bit of donation via paypal today.
Hope this some help.

Hello Tadgy. I appreciate everything you do for the Slackware community, & as such I’ve sent a donation your way.

-Rick

The guy I spoke to is Developer Advocate who's all about Open Source and is supportive. I made a shopping list of some VMs with unlimited bandwidth, and am just awaiting approval - we should know within a few days. One of the VM's I had in mind to host www.slackware.com so that the web site can be updated, but we'll see what volkerdi thinks about that ;-)

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Thanks Stuart

Were you thinking of a VPS for slackware.uk? I ask only because of the resources that would be required...

The slackware.uk host (slackware.uk runs as a VM on a custom built qemu hypervisor) has quite high resources that would be needed - the host is an 4 core (8 thread) Xeon with 64GB RAM that runs several VMs. Also, the slackware.uk VM has 2TB SSD storage for all the data on top of the disk space for the hypervisor to store the VMs, OS, etc.

I was hoping to either obtain a similar spec server of have a company sponsor the current server (which would save a lot of effort moving!). Also, would any server/VPS be hosted in the UK?

Cheers again Stuart - hopefully we can work something out

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I wonder if the Linode block storage attached to a VM would help you in this case for the mirror data.

Hi all,
The more observant amongst you may have noticed a new sponsor appearing on the https://slackware.uk/ website

I'm pleased to announce that I've secured a new sponsor in the form of UK Servers - I can't thank them enough for agreeing to become a sponsor, and for the brilliant spec server they have been willing to donate

The new server specification is as follows:
Yes, you read that right: 10Gb/s network connectivity - I think that should do for a few years to come! And the 100TB/month bandwidth is 5x the current bandwidth allowance. There will also be double the disk space of the current server, so I will be able to host and mirror more Slackware projects.

I'm extremely happy with this specification and, again, can't thank UK Servers enough - please take some time to review their offerings (using the link above or on the website, as it's tracked and will let them know they made a good investment) and consider them if you are looking for hosting services.

The server is currently being provisioned and should be online sometime in the next few days. I'll get things configured and moved over as soon as I can - I'll let people know here when that's done.

The sponsorship with UK Servers has been that they have dramatically reduced the monthly cost of this server for us; but it's not completely free (which is completely reasonable given the spec IMO), so the monthly patronage is more important than ever now. If you use the slackware.uk service and have the means, please consider making a one off, or regular monthly donation - every pound helps and all donations are very gratefully received

Many thanks to everyone who has donated previously and in the future - it's your support that has made this major upgrade possible.

Stuart, if Linode is still able to offer a VPS, it would be great if I could get one still - I'll need a new VPS to provide tertiary services once the move is complete. It wouldn't need to be a very powerful VPS now

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Great news Tadgy!!

Great, that's good news! It's funny because I remember the name 'UK Servers' as they they were a Colo customer of UKSolutions, although that's not mentioned on their web site (perhaps it was a company of the same name). IIRC the guy who used to visit the colo facility was Rob. I remember during one of the Slackware releases, the Slackware ARM FTP server I hosted there served as an x86 mirror as well and it saturated the 40Mbps uplink to the colo facility. Dan wasn't too pleased about it ;-)

I literally got an IM pop up with the authentication details for the new Slackware linode account moments before I saw your post here.
I'll be in touch in a bit about how to proceed. There is an option to create VMs in the UK.

Resurrecting an old thread

I've had an idea for a new feature/area on slackware.uk.

I'm in the process of provisioning a new VM for slackware.uk, so in a position to choose the filesystem to use for the mirror data on the server.

Normally, I'd just go with ext4 as I've always done; but BTRFS provides a subvolume/snapshot feature that I can use to implement a new archive area for Slackware (and other stuff mirrored on slackware.uk).

The idea would be to provide a "snapshot" of of the entire Slackware tree for a specific update. So, if there's an update today there would be a snapshot of the tree in its entirety in that exact state.

This differs from the cumulative archive where every set directory contains every version of a package that has been released... you can't just point slackpkg at that directory to install a package or use it for install media.

But with a snapshotted archive, it would only have the packages in the tree at the moment the snapshot is taken; allowing you to point slackpkg at it if you want to revert to a previous version of the tree, or create install media to install Slackware from a specific date.

What do people think? Worth my effort to implement? Would people use it?

The space overheads would be minimal as it would use BTRFS subvolumes, so that's not a concern.

Thoughts?

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In addition to snapshots you could continue to offer the cumulative archive by using "cp --reflink" to copy new files into the cumulative archive to keep the traditional interface for those who like it.

Personally I've rarely used your archive, but I like the snapshot idea.

The snapshot method also helps when a package is downgraded - the highest version number isn't necessarily the most current version.

The cumulative archive wouldn't be removed - the snapshots would be in addition to it

But yeah, I can save some space using rsync's --link-dest option (I don't cp it, it's done with rsync).

FWIW here, for similar purposes, I don't use snapshot at all: I use ext4 and keep stuff versioned, for example, with days tag, then I
then I do my rsyncs with the various upstreams on the hardlinked $today copy so that the stuff that changes is what occupies the additional space and nothing more.
this way there's the advantage that every $date folder is always available in a directory: I think this could also be applied to ChangeLog entries instead of doing it daily.

using the hardlinks has also the advantage that you can arbitrarily and safely remove any folder (as the stuff in the other folders is hardlinked).

I know I'm stating obvious things a bit but as of today I haven't yet found a more practical backup method...

I do see several benefits using btrfs. One of them is that if if you use zstd compression with the compression level 3 you will need roughly half the space on disk that you would need using ext4. Also the snapshots are done instantly and share the data with other ones, which means that they only grow when files in them are not found in any other one. Forza's wiki is full of useful information. People in the #btrfs channel of irc.libera.chat are generally kind and helpful including to end users. For backup there are several solutions, including btrfs send.

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