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Comment by jcrawfordor | Hacker News Reader

The fact that this is EPEL strongly suggests that it was set up by an AWS user, not by Amazon themselves. EPEL is not used by default in any common AWS AMIs. Perhaps it is an Amazon Linux user who enabled EPEL via Amazon's package, but it's not supported in the most recent version of AL so Amazon seems to have addresses that issue anyway.

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More likely this is a change in a popular AMI or container image that is being used by a lot of different users, eg. a startup script that unnecessarily pulls or syncs from EPEL.

I suspect there are only a handful of vendors with popular enough AMIs or container images that could account for this, though.

>that it was set up by an AWS user,

A user with "five million additional systems" on AWS?

A long time ago I knew a guy that uploaded a Counter-Strike patch to his ISP personal hosting and ended up on the official mirror list. Ended up taking down the ISP iirc.

> “A user with "five million additional systems" on AWS?”

Someone is going to be in for a big surprise when they get their AWS bill this month and realise there’s an infinite-loop bug in their instance spawning script.

It’s clearly either a large contract that would have been negotiated before any instances were spun up, or Amazon themselves.

I don't think it's one user; I think it's a ton of them. Want to use Let's Encrypt in your Openshift-on-AWS deployment? certbot's in EPEL, along with a lot of other quality-of-life stuff for log-shipping, monitoring, etc.

That is some massive AI training!

Each with a unique public IPv4 address too!

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