CentOS Donations

The CentOS team would like to remind you that the primary means of substaining the development of CentOS is via contributions by CentOS users.

CentOS is now, and will continue to be totally free; however, it takes money and resources to make CentOS available.

If you are able, please consider donating to the CentOS Project. Donations of promo material, public mirrors and dedicated servers are all vital to our contined operations.


Monetary


CentOS is currently reviewing our cash donation program. In the mean time we are not accepting any financial donations. We do appreciate though, if you want to - for example - help out with promo material. See our Wiki page on donations for more up to date information.




Dedicated Servers


If you would like to give something back to the CentOS Project and are considering a dedicated server donation, please contact us at donate.at.centos.org. Server donors are featured prominantly (with a sponsor provided 468x60 banner) on our Sponsors Page and there is a Spotlight link (with a sponsor provided 240x60 banner) on the CentOS.org front page.


We use donated dedicated servers for the following:



1. To distribute updates to clients directly via yum.

2. For distributing the CentOS tree to our external public mirrors.

3. For all our DNS, mail, mailing list and web services.

4. As the announce server for our BitTorrent downloads and as seeds for our BitTorrent downloads.

5. For some of the larger and less available hardware (ppc, s390, s390x, sparc, alpha, etc.), we use donated servers as build machines.


Here are the specs we need to use a dedicated machine for 1-4 above:


AMD or Intel based dual core or better >= 2.4ghz ( prefer: Quad core in either single quad core cpu, or dual cpu dual core format )

>= 500gb drive ( dual drives in raid1 preferred)

4gb RAM (>= 8gb preferred)

25 mbit/sec internet connection (> 50 mbit/sec preferred)

8 IP address subnet (5 useable IPs)


Unlimited monthly bandwidth (we average about 1800-2300 GB per machine currently per month)


Note: We have a great need for providers from Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and the Asia Pacific region to step up and donate dedicated servers as we now have an update system that can balance loads geographically.


Note: If you are an ISP and provide a dedicated server which we can use as a mirror, the CentOS project will manage that server. We will maintain it as an up to date mirror that your local CentOS machines can all use. The end result might be that your users get faster updates and in the end the total bandwidth consumed by doing CentOS updates for you actaully goes down ... and of course, you get to support the OS that is making you all that money.





Public Mirrors


If you are interested in becoming a public CentOS mirror:


Becoming a CentOS Public Mirror HOWTO


Current Public Mirrors


Other


Rack Space in Helsinki:

CentOS could use 6U to 8U of dedicated rack space in Helsinki, Finland. Please contact Pasi (blahee on irc) upi@iki.fi.



Rack Space in London:

We also need hosting colo space in London ( 6U to 8U ) for some of the machines we have here locally. Please contact Karanbir Singh ( z00dax on irc ) email : z00dax at centos.org if you can offer us this space.