Renting a "rebuild" control server?

[Baptiste Jonglez]

Hi Paul,

On 21-09-26, Paul Spooren wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I’m working on improving the reproducibility of OpenWrt. For that I modified the rebuilderd[1] software to support OpenWrt firmware and image builds[2] and run things on a private server[3].
> 
> The setup offers a nice gamification like motivation to fix reproducibility bugs, by using (a patched[4]) diffoscope[5] which shows nicely what makes things unreproducible, usually timestamps, sometimes race conditions. 
> 
> Since the availability of the current server may vary, so I’d like to split the setup into a control/web frontend server rented by OpenWrt project and some beefy workers, submitting results. The latter comes from me or whoever organization got some spare compute, the coordinator and web frontend should be hosted on a dedicated, OpenWrt project owned VM for long term availability. A sufficiently strong VM costs 20 Euro a month.
> 
> Any objections to setup such VM and show the results under i.e. rebuild.openwrt.org <http://rebuild.openwrt.org/>? Long term I’d reach out to other organizations to run such service for independent verification, however during development and repro bug fixing, I’d run this in-house.

Definitely +1 for hosting the control part on OpenWrt infra.  The cost is
not an issue, 20€ / month is cheap.

There has been some discussion about also renting servers for the rebuild
itself (what you call workers).  However, can you clarify whether you plan
to reuse our existing buildbot workers, or if these are completely
separate kind of workers?  If so, what are the specs?  How many workers
are we talking about?

FYI we discussed this during our infra meeting today [1] (well, it was
just me and Ansuel).

Baptiste

[1] https://openwrt.org/meetings/20260923-infra