One fine day, Brion Vibber said:
> Do feel free to ask other free projects and universities if they'd be
> interested in supporting the project...
I thought it might be a good idea to ask, so I sent out an email to ibiblio:
> Greetings - my name is Nick, and I help out with a site called Wikipedia.
> (http://www.wikipedia.org). It is a free, multi-lingual project to
> create a complete, accurate, and more importantly open content
> encyclopedia. All of the content is licensed under the GNU FDL (GFDL),
> meaning that anybody has the freedom to copy and redistribute it, with
> or without modifications, either commercially or non-commercially -
> although they may not put in place technical measures to conceal the
> content.
>
> The English language Wikipedia has over 117 thousand articles already,
> and by our calculations, we have about half the content of the
> Encyclopedia Britannica. We have many other languages, which are also
> quickly growing in size and diversity.
>
> However, we are currently facing both a budget and capacity crunch.
> In short, we have neither. Since Wikipedia is a volunteer based
> program, it is hard for us to raise the funds to purchase additional
> hardware. Right now, we are running off of a dual Athlon 1800+ server
> with 2GB of RAM and 36GB of SCSI storage. Unfortunately, the system is
> being pushed to its absolute limits, with little relief in sight. We
> are installing a second system this weekend as a front end, but even
> with that, we are not sure how long we can hold out. The dual Athlon
> system runs at a typical load of 15-20 during normal US working hours.
>
> Since our mission seems to be very much inline with ibiblio's mission, I was
> wondering if there was any way that Wikipedia could be hosted by ibiblio?
> It would be a great help to our project and the community.
>
> Thanks!
Much to my surprise, they replied:
> hi nick,
>
> we would LOVE to host wikipedia.org. our only concern is with the
> additional load wikipedia might put on our mysql server. BUT... if you
> could possibly hold off moving the site for two weeks or so john and
> fred will have us up on our new hardware - we're moving to a web cluster
> and will have a much more powerful database machine.
>
> if this is acceptable to you, please check out
> http://www.ibiblio.org/faq/ for more information about our setup, and
> just drop me a list of what accounts, dbs, unix groups, web directories,
> etc and we'll go from there. just let me know?
>
> thanks,
> donald www.ibiblio.org
> formerly known as SunSITE
> 919.843.8215 and stoof.
Seems like a good deal to me. We should probably tell them that they should
keep our database on a seperate MySQL server, as it will absolutely demolish
just about anything they make available.
Anyways, if somebody who knows the server requirements, layout, and other
what-not wants to let Donald and/or the list know, that would be awesome
(assuming that Brion is still interested in having someone else host the
site). Having ibiblio make all the outlays seems like a good deal to me
(plus, they're a non-profit org, so you could likely make tax-deductable
donations to them).
Anyways, that's that. :)
--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN
> Do feel free to ask other free projects and universities if they'd be
> interested in supporting the project...
I thought it might be a good idea to ask, so I sent out an email to ibiblio:
> Greetings - my name is Nick, and I help out with a site called Wikipedia.
> (http://www.wikipedia.org). It is a free, multi-lingual project to
> create a complete, accurate, and more importantly open content
> encyclopedia. All of the content is licensed under the GNU FDL (GFDL),
> meaning that anybody has the freedom to copy and redistribute it, with
> or without modifications, either commercially or non-commercially -
> although they may not put in place technical measures to conceal the
> content.
>
> The English language Wikipedia has over 117 thousand articles already,
> and by our calculations, we have about half the content of the
> Encyclopedia Britannica. We have many other languages, which are also
> quickly growing in size and diversity.
>
> However, we are currently facing both a budget and capacity crunch.
> In short, we have neither. Since Wikipedia is a volunteer based
> program, it is hard for us to raise the funds to purchase additional
> hardware. Right now, we are running off of a dual Athlon 1800+ server
> with 2GB of RAM and 36GB of SCSI storage. Unfortunately, the system is
> being pushed to its absolute limits, with little relief in sight. We
> are installing a second system this weekend as a front end, but even
> with that, we are not sure how long we can hold out. The dual Athlon
> system runs at a typical load of 15-20 during normal US working hours.
>
> Since our mission seems to be very much inline with ibiblio's mission, I was
> wondering if there was any way that Wikipedia could be hosted by ibiblio?
> It would be a great help to our project and the community.
>
> Thanks!
Much to my surprise, they replied:
> hi nick,
>
> we would LOVE to host wikipedia.org. our only concern is with the
> additional load wikipedia might put on our mysql server. BUT... if you
> could possibly hold off moving the site for two weeks or so john and
> fred will have us up on our new hardware - we're moving to a web cluster
> and will have a much more powerful database machine.
>
> if this is acceptable to you, please check out
> http://www.ibiblio.org/faq/ for more information about our setup, and
> just drop me a list of what accounts, dbs, unix groups, web directories,
> etc and we'll go from there. just let me know?
>
> thanks,
> donald www.ibiblio.org
> formerly known as SunSITE
> 919.843.8215 and stoof.
Seems like a good deal to me. We should probably tell them that they should
keep our database on a seperate MySQL server, as it will absolutely demolish
just about anything they make available.
Anyways, if somebody who knows the server requirements, layout, and other
what-not wants to let Donald and/or the list know, that would be awesome
(assuming that Brion is still interested in having someone else host the
site). Having ibiblio make all the outlays seems like a good deal to me
(plus, they're a non-profit org, so you could likely make tax-deductable
donations to them).
Anyways, that's that. :)
--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN