IXP-from-Scratch: Network and Security Design
• 11 min read
In the second of our “IXP from Scratch” series, we introduce network and security design decisions as well as implementations we made at DD-IX, an Internet Exchange in Dresden, Germany. In principle, an IX consists of a single broadcast domain, but in practice it has to operate several services sec…
“"the NixOS infrastructure relies heavily on GitHub" Why? NixOS needs to contact Github daily like ChromeOS needs to talk to Google? And if it is just to update packages, aren't they alternative sources?”
NixOS does not need to connect to GitHub daily. GitHub only hosts derivations (similar to "Makefiles") to build NixOS packages but not the actual packages. All packages are hosted on caches hosted by fastly (among other features, fastly supports IPv6). Once the derivations repository is retrieved and stored on your local system, you no longer need to contact GitHub, unless you want to switch to another compile configuration. One solution to avoid connecting to GitHub at all would be mirroring Nixpkgs somewhere else. But since the repository size increases continously to a size similar to the kernel repository, third-party providers don't like that so much. To give a rough estimate, Nixpkgs experiences one commit every 3 minutes.
Showing 1 comment(s)