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Non-Profit Colocation? 21

Posted by Cliff from the timely-idea dept.
dew asks: "I've just put together what might be the world's first non-profit focused on providing colocated Internet access for individuals, non-profits, and Open Source groups. We're called the California Community Colocation Project and we're part of a 501c3. We do not host any for-profit endeavors, personal or commercial. We've just opened our Palo Alto facilities and have multiple fiber drops to PAIX, where our upstream provider is heavily peered. I started this project to be as useful as possible to the non-profit and Open Source worlds: how would you best recommend I do that? Compile farms? A SourceForge mirror in case they go down?"
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Non-Profit Colocation? More

Non-Profit Colocation?

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  • SETI@Home (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Paranoid ( 12863 ) <my-user-name@meuk.org> on Sunday February 03, 2002 @06:10PM (#2947779)
    Perhaps SETI@Home [berkeley.edu] can use some help?
    They seem to have been heavily overtaxed recently...

  • Here are some ideas... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Adrian Voinea ( 216087 ) <adrianNO@SPAMgds.ro> on Sunday February 03, 2002 @06:18PM (#2947806) Homepage Journal
    You could:

    Take some load off kernel.org by mirroring them. Considering the problems they have had lately, this will be very useful

    Compile farms are another good idea, I love the Sourceforge implementation

    Host as many open source projects as you can. Beware, very few will turn out to be useful & important projects for us

    Design and advertise a site that explains the open-source phenomenon and shows success stories of open source implementations.
    ... well, that's all I could think of. Also, please keep in mind that the security risks are very high. Keep your software up-to date and read bugtraq daily :)

  • Pardon me for what may seem like a troll post, but I cannot help wonder if these site/org is for real.

    They call themselves CCCP ... a pun intended or an early April fools joke?

    And their web site [communitycolo.net]: Red background with Yellow letters. If not a visual pun, it shows poor color choice in terms of readability. If their web site is poorly designed, what else is in questionable shape?

    • Pardon me for what may seem like a troll post, but I cannot help wonder if these site/org is for real.
      They call themselves CCCP ... a pun intended or an early April fools joke?

      And their web site [communitycolo.net]: Red background with Yellow letters. If not a visual pun, it shows poor color choice in terms of readability. If their web site is poorly designed, what else is in questionable shape?

      I can assure you it's real, I have been talking to dew and I am about to move a box into the facility, Also I have told him I am available for volunteer work.

      When I first saw the site a month ago I was looking for a place for me and a few friends to place some boxes, all the regular colo's wanted upwards of $800-1000 dollars a month, but not being a buisness there was no way we could afford it.

      To me this is a wonderful idea, it will allow normal people and non-profit companies a place to host sites and services for a much more reasonable price. (Free, donations sugested) I am looking forward to the day I am ready to move my boxes in and all the fun and experiance I can get volunteering.

      If you think the site is designed that bad I'm sure dew would be more then happy if you offered to design him a better one. Remember this is a 100% non-profit and I know dew is spending alot of his personal money to get it moving, so of course hiring a firm to design the page is out of the question. I would do it but one look at my site would tell you I'm no pro myself.

      I hope this idea takes off and communities all over the US (and the World) will soon have a place to co-locate for cheap.

      • I've also sponsored some hardware for the CCCP as well as doing some admin work.

        This project is definitly real and the CCCP pun is just that...or rather a *nod* to a somewhat socialist concept. (In fact, the IWW might start colocating with us)

        -davidu

  • Not the first, but still a good idea (Score:4, Informative)

    by Snowfox ( 34467 ) <snowfox@NOsPaM.snowfox.net> on Sunday February 03, 2002 @08:52PM (#2948296) Homepage
    ISP From Hell [ispfh.org] has been doing what you're doing for years now.

    It's still a neat idea, and short of hosting outside of the USA, breaking away from commercial providers like this is the only way to get real freedom, as in Freedom of Speech, from an ISP.

    You should exchange notes with other non-profit ISPs. Were a network of non-profit ISPs - free from commercial interests - to spread across the globe, you could change the world.

  • faqs.org (Score:2, Informative)

    by BCoates ( 512464 )
    ... could use some help the last I heard.

    --
    Benjamin Coates
  • I would say that the best contribution to the linux community that you could make, assuming that you have the bandwidth, is to mirror distributions in ISO format like www.linuxiso.org does.

    I have had nothing but trouble trying to download ISO images due to several problems that higher server bandwidth would have certainly fixed.

    eg. Some servers require HTTP downloads, including www.linuxiso.org (??). Downloading a huge file for days at a time in Windows is just asking for an error. Also, the RedHat server always "resets" my FTP connections in the middle of the night. And, most FTP servers have bandwidth restrictions, even during off-peak times, that are not dependent upon the server load.

    I would guess that load on these types of servers would be greatly reduced if people could download what they need quickly, without having to abort downloads and restart from scratch.

  • Aren't they *ALL* non-profit? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've worked for several colo-providers, and all of them were apparently non-profit enterprises. At least they didn't make enough money to keep up with loan payments and such.

    Most are bankrupt now. When I first saw the headline I thought perhaps someone had written something about one of them . . .

    Oh well. Back to lurking.
  • There are lots of things you can do to benefit open source. Mirroring some of the world's highest volume websites might be one of them. But if you do that, you're going to saturate your network pipe, and make the rest of your site less accessible. If big bandwidth isn't your main strength (MBA translation: core competency) then don't get drawn into providing it. If projects need free DNS, mail hosting, compile farms, etc, you can do all of that better with nice, low latency.

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