Beagle’s choice to host its own Gitlab server at OpenBeagle.org has been a mixed bag, to say the least. We are very much entertaining the idea of utilizing a Gitlab hosting service, rather than run our own instance, but the lessons-learned from doing a bit of Internet-wide DevOps continue to sharpen our knowledge of “real-world computing”.
Users will notice now that we are running Anubis. Now, I cannot say it is a great idea for us to give away all our practices to try to stop the bots, but I’m a big believer in that security by obscurity is no security at all. I don’t love the solution, but it has been critical in getting the server to run with all of the bots out there amounting to a huge distributed denial of service attack. It has created big challenges in enabling https-cloning and gitlab-runner communication. It is probably hurting our respectable web-crawler results and interfering with training models on useful Beagle data.
That said, we are trying to keep our presence on Github in good shape and have mirrors setup between many of the repositories for any time OpenBeagle.org is having trouble.
And that’s well and good, but the custom gitlab-runner instances for things like the BeagleV-Fire gateware can’t be enabled in any reasonable way on another host where we aren’t controlling the access to *some* extent.
Anyway, we hope things are working nicely now. If so and you want to give kudos, or, more likely, you are seeing some problems, please reach out with any ideas to address the flood of bots or otherwise express your frustration.
I make it no secret that I’m not a fan of Discord (as a closed-source tool with a walled garden), but nearly 3,000 folks in the Beagle community have made it a place to go, so feel free to reach out to me (jkridner) on Beagle’s Discord #openbeagle channel. This topic is also suitable for discussion on the (much more open) site feedback section of our forum.