Toolserver Journal » daniel

River becomes the first paid toolserver admin

daniel — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:23:29 +0000

The Toolserver now has a paid admin: Wikimedia Deutschland contracted River Tarnell to look after the Toolserver, starting February 1. As you probably know, River has been an integral part of the Toolserver team from the very beginning, and has done a great job as a volunteer. However, when doing system administration in your spare time, the more annoying jobs tend to be left – which may lead to unpleasantness or even downtime every now and then. A fixed number of hours dedicated to the toolserver and a protocol for emergency situations will now help us to get the Toolserver’s availability to at least 99%.

Contracting a payed admin should also benefit the other Toolserver administrators, as they can now rely on River to look after the every day operations and to coordinate further administration work. Volunteer work will of course remain an essential component in the operation of the Toolserver, as is the case with all Wikimedia projects.

Wikimedia Deutschland wants to thank everyone who works on the toolserver, all admins and users, for their great contributions. We look forward to a future of even greater success of the Tooserver project!

Wikimedia Foundation Grants $40,000 to the Toolserver

daniel — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:49:41 +0000

The Wikimedia Foundation has approved a grant of $40,000 towards improving the Toolserver’s reliability. We requested the grant in April, and we are very happy it worked out. The background of the grant is that the most central feature of the Toolserver, live replication of the nearly 800 wiki databases, is far too shaky. If it breaks for a day or so, or we have any kind of corruption, we need to import a full new dump, causing days and weeks of outdated information for Toolserver users (and for the users of Toolserver users’ tools). It also means that during such times, there is no up to date off-site backup of the wiki databases.

To improve this situation, we plan to buy three new database servers, so we can keep two copies of each database, instead of just one. This way, one copy will remain available when the other breaks, and we will be able to fix things without too much interruption. The new servers will very likely be the same as our other newer database servers, namely, Sun Fire X4250s with 32GB RAM and 16 internal disks with 146 GB each. We hope to have these online some time in September or October. This should greatly improve the availability of live replication, and thus of any tools relying on real time information.

Faster, Better, Stronger

daniel — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 10:53:41 +0000

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.