Archive for April, 2009
Faster, Better, Stronger
Yesterday, Wikimedia Deutschland has ordered five new Servers, three of which will be added to the toolserver cluster. They will be delivered (hopefully) in two to three weeks, and will go online perhaps a week or two after that. Here’s what the servers will be used for:
The first server will replace Zedler as our database server for the s2 cluster. Zedler is our oldest database server, and has lately been overloaded nearly constantly. We may keep Zedler around with a backup copy of s2, but it will mostlky be idle. We’ll see what use we can put it to later on.
The second server will take Hemlock’s duty of serving the home directories, and it will become the host system of the stable server. This means the stable server becomes virtualized (probably as a Solaris zone). Willow (the current server for stable projects) will then be free, we will probably make it into a second login server where users can run bots. This should take some load off Nightshade.
The thirs server is the “OpenStreetMap Toolserver”: it will be for the OpenStreeMap project what the Toolserver cluster has so far been for Wikimedia projects: a place to play with data and host bots and web applications. The Toolserver rules have been changed to accomodate this.
All in all, we will then have 12 servers in the Toolserver cluster.
The two remaining servers that have been ordered yesterday will also be used for the OpenStreetMap project, but not in the context of the Toolserver. They will be used to integrate interactive maps from OpenStreetMap directly into wikipedia Articles. More information about the OSM integration project is avialable on meta.
Wherein the Toolserver journal is reborn in a much less annoying fashion
So, for a while we used Apache Roller for the journal. Roller was something I’d used before (as a user, not an admin), and it could be integrated into our web SSO system, so it seemed like a good fit. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out so well. Roller is rather clunky to use, and has a few small bugs (mostly related to SSO) that made it somewhat unpleasant to use. Today, it decided not to allow a new user to log in, and wouldn’t provide any sort of useful error message besides Java stack traces. So, I decided it was time for a change.
The Toolserver journal is now running on WordPress. WordPress is much nicer to use, looks nicer for users, and has a large community of users. It was also very easy to set up, and allowed us to import the old posts from Roller. The only downside is the lack of an up-to-date LDAP integration plugin. However, I don’t think that should be too hard to write…
PS: In case Planet gets confused by the change and re-displays all our old posts–sorry!