Mailing List Archive

Hardware inventory
Jason and I are taking stock of our hardware, and I'm going to find a
secondary machine to devote exclusively to doing apache for wikipedia,
i.e. with no other websites on it or anything. I'll loan the machine
to the Wikipedia Foundation until the Foundation has money to buy a
new machine later on this year.

We'll keep the MYSQL where it is, on the powerful machine. The new
machine will be no slouch, either.

Today is Friday, and I think we'll have to wait for Jason to take a
trip to San Diego next week sometime (or the week following) to get
this all setup. (The machine I have in mind is actually in need of
minor repair right now.)

By having this new machine be exclusively wikipedia, I can give the
developers access to it, which is a good thing.

This will *not* involve a "failover to read-only" mechanism, I guess,
but then, it's still going to be a major improvement -- such a
mechanism is really a band-aid on a fundamental problem, anyway.

------

Lots of people think it's a good thing to set up mirror servers all
over the Internet. It's really not that simple. There are issues of
organizational trust with user data, issues with network latency, etc.
Some things should be decentralized, some things should be
centralized.
Re: Hardware inventory [ In reply to ]
On Fre, 2003-02-07 at 11:56, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Lots of people think it's a good thing to set up mirror servers all
> over the Internet. It's really not that simple. There are issues of
> organizational trust with user data, issues with network latency, etc.
> Some things should be decentralized, some things should be
> centralized.

Mirroring wiki in a meaningful sense (i.e. read/write) is not practical.
However, a read-only mirror (which wouldn't need the user database) is
fairly easy to set up, in fact, I might run one myself eventually if
just to have faster access to the Wikipedia information. Of course,
having quarterly Wikipedia CDs or DVDs would also be damn cool.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de
Re: Hardware inventory [ In reply to ]
Erik Moeller wrote:
> However, a read-only mirror (which wouldn't need the user database) is
> fairly easy to set up, in fact, I might run one myself eventually if

Has this ever been tried? Are there any examples to learn from?
If you do this, how would you present it? As "Wikipedia" (out of
date and with no edit link?) or as "Erik's copy of Wikipedia"?
Or would there be an edit link that goes to the real Wikipedia?
Most users know what an FTP mirror is, but will they understand a
wiki mirror?


--
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/