Back in the day when I used to work for Connect (which then became AAPT), we used to supply WebCentral with their connectivity out of Brisbane. Back then, WebCentral was the be all and end all of web hosting providers. They used to host Whirlpool and the service was second to none.

Fast forward several years and what the hell happened?

I’ve been trying to deal with WebCentral for a client over the last few months and to say the service is terrible is an understatement. I’ve had jobs lodged in their ticketing system for missing DNS records (MX records? Meh! Who needs em!) for well over a week with no reply. Calling the support line gets a “I’ll lodge a job for you to look into that” - which I may as well done myself. Oh, and the fatal flaw with their support line - all calls going in get terminated after 1 hour. So if you’re on hold for 40+ minutes (which I have been several times), then you have 20 minutes or less to get your issue resolved or the phone system will hang up on you. That means go to the back of the queue and start again.

For anyone out there that still remembers WebCentral from the glory days - beware - they certainly aren’t the same company anymore!

I’ve been keeping an eye on the stats of the distribution of my Xen and Kernel-Xen packages now for around 12 months. I find it interesting that they just keep getting more and more popular. First, some stats:

How did I get these stats? Thats a little more complex. This is the count of requests for the file kernel-xen-release-6-4.noarch.rpm from a single mirror. This package is only installed once - and not redownloaded after initial installation. The mirror is referenced in most of the install guides that are found around the internet. What it doesn’t take into account is the other five mirror sites, local copies etc etc. I think this figure may well be accurate, however there is a good possibility that it is greatly underestimating the real number of servers out there referencing my repos.

This consists of approx 22 security vulnerabilities of Xen across the now non-maintained v4.1 branch as well as the current 4.2 branch. I have not counted kernel vulnerabilities as these are fixed normally within the standard release cycle - and not as seperate patches.

So how does this turn into finances?

Well, I’ve asked for donations for a while to help offset the costs in producing and developing these packages. Since starting in 2011, I have received exactly $80AUD in donations. This means that given the number of hours working on these packages, I effectively work for about $0.12c per hour. This also excludes any expenses in hosting, equipment or server expenses.

How does this affect the projects?

This is easy. If a server dies, I can’t replace it. If I suffer a hardware failure, I can’t replace it. If hosting costs increase, I can’t pay them.

So - this makes me wonder… How do people survive doing open source development? Sure there are companies like Citrix, RedHat etc that employ people to contribute to FOSS - however what about everyone else? Comments welcome below!

For those of you who chat to me on IRC (chat.freenode.net / #slforum), the majority would know about the extra packages I end up building for EL6. I figured as not everyone gets on IRC, I’d publish them here as well:

1) Repository for LibreOffice 4 - Download the .repo file into /etc/yum.repos.d/ then install using something like yum install LibreOffice*.

2) Misc packages - This currently contains:

1. dovecot - newer version, managesieve + pigeonhole for server side mail filtering
2. e2fsprogs - v1.42.7 as of today. Includes the e4defrag program to defragment ext4 filesystems
3. powertop - used to measure power usage on laptops as well as give hints on decreasing power usage. Much newer version that stock.

Both get updated quite frequently.

I figured that I should probably let people know that I am available to assist people with Xen installations / troubleshooting and support.

My rates are currently $85AUD per hour with a minimum of 2 hours per support event. This can be paid using either PayPal or credit card.

I support the packages I build, as well as their operation on RHEL6, CentOS 6 or Scientific Linux 6 (preferred).

I also provide support contracts over a set timeframe - however these are negotiated per contract according to complexity.

For further information, feel free to contact me via email: netwiz@crc.id.au

I’ve finally managed to get some time to try building libvirt 1.0.3 for people to test.

Packages are available from http://au1.mirror.crc.id.au/repo/el6/testing/

Please direct all feedback to the kernel-xen mailing list.

EDIT: Feedback is good for these packages.. Pushed to the main repo…