[Nix-dev] Set up a Sufficiently Powerful Build Farm

[Daniel Peebles]

I spoke with Rob Vermaas about donating Darwin machines and we decided that
the hosted Mac options were indeed too expensive. As far as I could tell,
the best Mac compute power for the money is a Mac Mini from the previous
generation (or the one before it) since they had 4-core i7 CPUs back then
(the more recent ones only have 2-core CPUs and often i5s unless you spend
lots of money).

I bought one of those older Mac Minis off eBay as a donation to the NixOS
foundation, and once it ships to them they will manage the machine as part
of the main Hydra cluster.

It would sometimes be more appealing to host the machines ourselves, but
unfortunately there are all sorts of trust issues there which we haven't
yet solved, so I think the best bet for now if you want Darwin Hydra to get
stronger is either to donate to the foundation so they can buy more
(Darwin) build boxes, or to donate hardware directly as I did.

-Dan

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 4:39 AM, Christian Theune <ct at flyingcircus.io>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> another option that I didn’t mention but researched was looking for hosted
> Mac machines, but I find those offensively expensive (around 60€ per
> smallest mac mini per month). That means the price of a machine every 10
> months.
>
> Cheers,
> Christian
>
> On 22 Dec 2015, at 10:27, Christian Theune <ct at flyingcircus.io> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On 29 Oct 2015, at 14:37, Eelco Dolstra <eelco.dolstra at logicblox.com>
> wrote:
> Thus the main problem right now is Darwin
> builds, which are done on a single Mac mini…
>
>
> This is actually also becoming a pain for me as even the channel branches
> aren’t populated with the most basic packages and I keep compiling the
> world for even the most simple package update on OS X.
>
> What’s the biggest blocker here? Is it money for another machine? Is it
> someone taking care of it? Is it placing them somewhere with a reasonable
> uplink?
>
> I could put one or more mac minis in our office on a reasonable big pipe
> (100mbit fibre up/down). Question is whether we could fund them somehow.
> Would a single additional machine help or do we need multiple? (For
> anchoring: the app store prices the smallest one at 569€ and the question
> is: would we rather have multiple small ones or a bigger one? Or would a
> bigger investment into a Mac Pro make sense?
>
> But before going into details: what’s the biggest blocker at the moment?
>
> Christian
>
> --
> Christian Theune · ct at flyingcircus.io · +49 345 219401 0
> Flying Circus Internet Operations GmbH · http://flyingcircus.io
> Forsterstraße 29 · 06112 Halle (Saale) · Deutschland
> HR Stendal HRB 21169 · Geschäftsführer: Christian. Theune, Christian.
> Zagrodnick
>
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>
> --
> Christian Theune · ct at flyingcircus.io · +49 345 219401 0
> Flying Circus Internet Operations GmbH · http://flyingcircus.io
> Forsterstraße 29 · 06112 Halle (Saale) · Deutschland
> HR Stendal HRB 21169 · Geschäftsführer: Christian. Theune, Christian.
> Zagrodnick
>
>
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