
Request for Funding OpenBSD Project's Electricity - adamnemecek
http://www.mail-archive.com/misc@openbsd.org/msg125651.html
======
zdw
There's a picture of the rack from 2009:

[http://www.openbsd.org/images/rack2009.jpg](http://www.openbsd.org/images/rack2009.jpg)

I think the big reason Theo doesn't want to ship this offsite is that it's a
lot of old/esoteric equipment that often times needs physical TLC in order to
make it run properly, or has weird boot requirements, interfaces, etc.

They still have m68k, VAX, and Alpha boxes that are at a minimum 10 years old,
that they build the OS directly on all the time.

~~~
ams6110
Wow, that's a pretty sketchy looking "machine room". Wires dangling
everywhere, and it looks like a tinderbox (cardboard lying around, wooden
beams overhead....)

~~~
zorpner
I've spent time in dozens ... maybe hundreds of server closets in
academia/companies that have been around for a few decades, and this is easily
on the very, very clean side. When there are no rewards for cleaning up and
every reason not to mess with something that works, little tends to be done on
the aesthetic side. Ask me sometime about the server closet for a group that
aggregated hundreds of remote telemetry sensors... by per-sensor dedicated
copper lines that had been around since the 70s.

~~~
DanBC
It's a bit surprising considering OpenBSD's rigorous insistence on
correctness.

------
sheetjs
> A number of logistical reasons prevents us from moving the machines to
> another location which might offer space/power for free,

Regardless of the scale, I suspect it would be easier for some companies to
offer space and power than to pay bills

~~~
masklinn
Which is likely why he specifically noted that he could/would not move the
machines: he knows this and wants to preempt companies offering free power in
a separate space.

~~~
gonzo
and since the current space is Theo's basement...

------
dsr_
Any clue as to scale? I suspect more businesses might be interested in funding
a $5K/year project than a $50K project.

~~~
tedunangst
The machine room has an air conditioner that runs during the winter in
Calgary.

~~~
cperciva
That could mean anything from about 5 kW upwards, which I believe is around
$3500/year of electricity in Calgary. Can you be a bit more specific?

~~~
tedunangst
Not really. It's not my department. dsr wanted a clue, that's the best one
I've got...

~~~
gonzo
Here's something from 2006 that quotes Theo saying the bill was around 100
USD/week.

[http://openbsd.das.ufsc.br/press.html](http://openbsd.das.ufsc.br/press.html)

and something else that says $600/mo:

[https://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?t=38488&p=218116](https://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?t=38488&p=218116)

------
shin_lao
What is the difference between asking a company to pay for the electric bill
and asking for money to pay the bills?

~~~
pedrocr
_> That way the various OpenBSD efforts can be supported, yet written off as
an off-site operations cost by such a company._

Tax reasons it appears. Maybe they don't have non-profit status and so a
donation can't be put in as a cost before tax but an electricity bill can.

~~~
lflux
There's OpenBSD Foundation, which is non-profit but not tax-deductible
apparently:
[http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html](http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html)

~~~
cperciva
_non-profit but not tax-deductible_

FWIW, this is because Canada is far more restrictive than the USA in terms of
what constitutes a "charitable purpose". The FreeBSD Foundation would not be
able to give charitable-donation tax receipts if it were Canadian either.

------
gonzo
I sense increasingly shrill sounds emanating from the OpenBSD camp.

Monday: Theo De Raadt, complaining about FreeBSD security, after giving commit
access to NSA/FBI contractors to install backdoors in OpenBSD back in 2003.

[http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-
source/62641-cry...](http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-
source/62641-crypto-freebsd-playing-catch-up-says-de-raadt)

Pull quote: — "Now we all discover that FreeBSD has been doing it wrong. It's
not as if they operate in a closed source world, and couldn't have looked at
what others did. They must have chosen a few years ago to do this wrong,
intentionally.

"Perhaps that decision was made by their Californian developers, the ones who
work fairly close to that NSA building. —

And his presentation from ruBSD 2013 last week
([http://tech.yandex.ru/events/yagosti/ruBSD/](http://tech.yandex.ru/events/yagosti/ruBSD/))

[http://www.openbsd.org/papers/ru13-deraadt/](http://www.openbsd.org/papers/ru13-deraadt/)

In which our friend Theo de Raadt talks about measures in OpenBSD that make
attackers life harder: memory allocation randomization, W^X pages and stack
protectors.

Of course it’s served with a side dish of invective at FreeBSD, as the project
does not use all his cool stuff, and how could it then claim to be called a
secure system, hmm?

Dear Theo,

Playing the game called 'guess my memory address' with attackers might be fun,
but better to actually isolate them via cap_enter(2), and guarantee success
rather than attempting to make a successful attack less probable. Security
isn't a game.

Your friend,

FreeBSD

After Theo came Henning Brauer speaking about OpenBSD’s variant of pf.

Seems they have made yet another syntax change recently, and that pf
performance is up, (but no numbers were reported).

Since Gleb (who re-engineered pf to be multi-threaded for FreeBSD 10) had
presented earlier in the day, with actual results:
[http://image.slidesharecdn.com/rubsdsmirnov-131214051554-php...](http://image.slidesharecdn.com/rubsdsmirnov-131214051554-phpapp01/95/slide-61-1024.jpg?cb=1387019979)

Henning was, of course, queried. Gleb reports that Henning responded, "'in
FreeBSD pf is faster than in OpenBSD' is actually a lie, and that if you pick
a proper uniprocessor hardware you will see, that in OpenBSD pf can forward 3
times more than in FreeBSD."

Unfortunately, he didn't give any hint on the model of hardware he used to
generate this result, so reproducing his results becomes… difficult.

Then yesterday we get the tight-lipped email from asking for someone to pay
the power bill for OpenBSD.

I hope he doesn’t get someone in trouble for the obvious tax dodge.

Someone else pointed out the rack pic from 2009. Note Theo standing in-front
of the same rack in the itwire piece above, _and_ the same photo is used in
his speaker page for ruBSD
([http://tech.yandex.ru/events/yagosti/ruBSD/talks/1487/](http://tech.yandex.ru/events/yagosti/ruBSD/talks/1487/)).

So I doubt it's changed much in the past 5 years.

~~~
ef47d35620c1
___" OpenBSD’s variant of pf"_ __

The OpenBSD devs wrote pf from scratch. Mac OS X, FreeBSD and NetBSD took it
and now use it and have variants of it. OpenBSD has the original, standard pf
that they wrote from scratch and gave to the world as free software. OpenBSD
's pf is not a ___variant_ __of pf. It is the __ _original_ __. And it 's
insulting and incorrect of you to suggest otherwise.

~~~
gonzo
var·i·ant ˈve(ə)rēənt/ noun 1\. a form or version of something that differs in
some respect from other forms of the same thing or from a standard

See also: netBSD, or even 386BSD

------
yeukhon
I wonder if they can just approach to Google and ask if they could just donate
a couple Compute Engines...

but at the same point, why do we need freebds and openbsd? In terms of
resource, can't we get merge the two team together?

~~~
weland
> but at the same point, why do we need freebds and openbsd? In terms of
> resource, can't we get merge the two team together?

Are you a project manager?

~~~
yeukhon
Wow, the tone is very harsh here. What's wrong with my suggestion? i honestly
don't get all the downvotes here. smh. Even they are two distinct projects by
now, there is no need to be harsh and ask if I were a project manager. The
Internet is open to people to question.

~~~
weland
I don't know about the others. I downvoted because I don't like suggestions
phrased as questions (and yeah, that tends to be what project managers do when
they have no useful contribution to offer, can't be bothered to learn anything
about the project they're managing, but want to feel like they're not
useless).

~~~
yeukhon
First of all, there are project managers who are also devs. So you are in fact
insulting thousands of hard working devs who have to take the role of a
project manager.

Secondly, don't assume that kind of question is coming from project manager's
voice. That's rather stupid and narrow minded. Any one can ask that question.

Whether the project is so distinct in terms of code or philosophy, it is a
genuine question. Anyone should be allowed to ask question. All the downvotes
are either because (1) some bigot mind can't appreciate question, or (2)
people who can't get along with the other development team so any thought on
merging two project must be a crime, or (3) people just hate my idea of asking
Google to donate a couple machines.

You are just making the *BSD world bad because no one shall ever asked such
stupid question why two teams should never think about merging into a single
team.

~~~
weland
> Whether the project is so distinct in terms of code or philosophy, it is a
> genuine question. Anyone should be allowed to ask question. All the
> downvotes are either because (1) some bigot mind can't appreciate question,
> or (2) people who can't get along with the other development team so any
> thought on merging two project must be a crime, or (3) people just hate my
> idea of asking Google to donate a couple machines.

Or (4), people are strongly adversarial to the "why do we need" question in
the context of open source projects. Do we also _really need_ iOS and Android?
Windows and OS X and Linux and the many flavours of BSD? Chocolate and vanilla
ice cream?

> Whether the project is so distinct in terms of code or philosophy, it is a
> genuine question.

No it isn't.

Yes, people who dislike your ideas will downvote you. It's pretty much how the
interwebs work. If there are more people who dislike them than people who like
them, the downvotes will outweight the upvotes. There also tends to be no
correlation between how bad an idea is and how many downvotes or upvotes it
receives. Because the Internet is full of mean, misbehaving people like me.

