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hosting offers



Hi,

In a recent discussion on the -sparc list, it turned out that we seem to
have something of a habit of getting hardware offers, but not knowing
exactly what to do with them :)

The matter of shipping hardware and the associated cost always comes up.
I don't think we've footed the bill for shipping hardware very often,
because of a known fact, or at least widely held opinion, that it's very
expensive.

But a more important matter is that we may not have to ship things very far
or so very expensively if we know exactly where we can send them, and if
the cost is calculated based on a wider set of options, rather than whatever
is known by a handful of people discussing a specific offer.

We don't seem to have any sort of a list (database) of available hosting
offers.

Maybe it would be worth setting up a separate (archived) mail alias @d.o
and then tell people that they can send information there. That would be
a start, at least.

We could then tell people to send information there, it wouldn't be made
public (because various details of hosting offers can be private), and they
could tell us which kind of stuff they can take, how much of it, what's the
long-term prospect of keeping it, who would take care of it on site, those
kinds of things.

As far as concrete problems, I'll note two things:

* debian-admin should have received a fair few offers back when they posted
  a public call for hosting of those two machines, so if that info can be
  collected and verified again, it should be a useful chunk of the list
* I am of the opinion that if we get charged e.g. 750 USD for shipping a
  large box overseas or something like that, that sounds expensive, but if
  the overhead of finding a specific machine and getting it to the right
  place is large and takes a lot of time to get it online in a decent
  setting, so large that nobody actually wants to bother, and no progress is
  made, then those 750 USD were not worth saving.

-- 
     2. That which causes joy or happiness.



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