Repositories of Elive survived from hosting policies

[Thanatermesis]

Some days ago I received a notification from Dreamhost (which is used to host a few things of Elive) claiming that I need to remove the full repositories of Elive because they where using a considerable size in their servers not being specifically for a website purpose

In other words:

The repositories of Elive was in danger!

This means that if we don’t have repositories, we cannot install software from the package manager.

Specifically, these repository directories takes a space of 150 GB, and I had no other place to put them, hosting this size is expensive and with the funding of Elive is simply not possible to maintain them in a dedicated hosting.

Even worse: These repositories contains (between other things), a copy of the Debian Wheezy branch and also the Debian Leeny one! both of them doesn’t exist anymore so if we lose them, we will lose these packages forever!

Linux’s releases after a time, are abandoned

Imagine that you want to use a specific version of a Linux distro, which after a time their repositories are not available anymore, they will recommend you to update your system, but the thing is that you are simply unable to use these versions anymore, so no matter if you have a very old computer that simply works good with the old setup, or you just want to maintain it working over the years, you will be simply unable to continue using it correctly, that’s one of the reasons of why Elive uses it’s own copy of the main repositories

• Actually there’s some people that stills interestedin use the very old, previous stable version of Elive (2.0 Topaz) because it simply works very good on a very-very old computer.

In fact, you can download and try yourself the old ‘Elive 2.0 Topaz’ and see that the repositories still working, this means, you can still install packages in a 10 years old distro!

Is not this something that is simply really good to have?

So what happened ?

How to make the repositories survival for all the users of Elive?

This is where Gary Fowless, one of the mirrors for the ISOs, showing his to Elive and all it’s users, offered a very good quality space where to transfer and host the repositories.

Actually, when you are using the package manager to install software, you are doing it from his server, so thanks to him, you can still use the package manager

Elive (and all its users) are very grateful with your important contribution to the project!

Thanks a lot Gary !!!

[stoppy98]

thanks a lot gary.
I agree with you, the fact that i can be able to still use a really old os and update it whenever i need it’s great.
150 gb is not such an impossible size, i’d like to help, but at best i could afford an atom powered server which would be meh in case of big workloads! Or am i mistaken? in case it could work, i think i may help too!

[Thanatermesis]

I don’t think that it has big workloads, users dont constantly use the repos and the auto-updater tool in elive is programmed to run in a very light way too

The only problem with this is as explained, the price of the size in normal hostings, and when a hosting says “unlimited size” it is with small letters (like, only for website-specific purposes, reason on which dreamhost requested me to delete it)

The best would be to have hosting helps without a strict limit in size, like universities, or a computer in a house / office that never shuts down, etc… actually we have the help of Gary on this one , if in the future we need to change it, well, maybe will be needed to send a newsletter asking for a volonteer hosting, hum

In a perfect future world, internet may be decentralized and repos run like the torrent technology shared among users lol, im pretty sure that there’s already projects that does these magic things

[stoppy98]

Well I’ll say something if i finally find some time and money to complete my tiny server.
The internet will be decentralized. I’m looking forward for writing my thesis exactly about this topic.
I’ve been working a bit on decentralization in a tiny project and it is so exciting

[paxlex]

We hope that something will move in this direction in the future. elive being little known does not allow its diffusion

[Elivish]

I have not been able to use Elive repositories. It says key expired for the 2.0. I used the script to fix them but it didn’t help.

The repositories for the old debian distros are in http:// archive dot debian dot org so they are not gone.

[Thanatermesis]

@Elivish

I have not been able to use Elive repositories. It says key expired for the 2.0. I used the script to fix them but it didn’t help.

Note: this is for the 2.0 version which is and old and not supported version, but i try to do my best to have them still working

@Elivish

The repositories for the old debian distros are in http:// archive dot debian dot org so they are not gone.

Hum that's right, thanks for the point, we can still use these ones for the 2.0 references to debian repos, this can be also useful for the future for 3.0 if we have the debian repos unable to host too!

But let's continue talking about the 2.0 repositories on this thread: Old Topaz 2.0 repositories - #2 by Thanatermesis since here is a different topic

[TheTechRobo]

How did you download the entire repos to your server?