December 23, 2021

The Cluster Administration Team provides many services, such as ensuring that the Project’s equipment is running reliably. You can read about the team’s full responsibilities in their charter here. With such an essential role, the FreeBSD Foundation contributes to Cluster Administration by purchasing and helping to maintain hardware to support the FreeBSD infrastructure. Here are some of the purchases made in the last couple of years to support the Cluster Administration team and the Project:

  • SSD backed pkg and Git mirror for US east coast
  • New servers to run the cgit web interface
  • Web server to host web sites (www, docs, cgi, and ftp-sync)
  • New web servers to run the FreeBSD Bugzilla instance and the wiki. Due to the old hardware, both sites were often timing out. This has been resolved with the new servers.
  •  New web server to hosts reviews.freebsd.org and some other web services
  •  New server to host the Git repository
  • Two new servers for expruns. These are high-core-count systems necessary for testing package builds.
  • New FTP and pkg mirror for Malaysia
  • Four new Ampere eMAG pkg builders for arm64 packages
  • Reference servers. These are host jails that FreeBSD committers can access to test src and ports on arm64. This was required for arm64 becoming a tier1 platform for FreeBSD 13.0.
  • New server to build freebsd-update for arm64.

The Foundation also supports the cluster administration with human resources. Li-Wen Hsu, a full-time employee of the Foundation, is an active member of the Cluster Administration Team.

— Contributed by Joseph Mingrone