[Foundation-l] State of technology: 2007

[Samuel Klein]

On Jan 3, 2008 9:07 PM, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello colleagues and shareholders (community :)!

Hi.  Fabulous colleague-shareholder-report you have there; but could
you fix the transition speed on your powerpoint slides?  and the font
in the footer...

> Rob joining to help us with datacenter operations has allowed to have
> really nice turnarounds with pretty much every datacenter work - as
> volunteer remote hands became not available during critical moments
> anymore.

Is this a general trend -- remote hands not being available during
critical moments -- or a chicken-and-egg issue with other elements
(such as Rob being around)?

> Oh, and look how tidy cabling is: http://flickr.com/photos/midom/2134991985/ !
>
> == Networking ==
>
> This has been mainly in capable Mark's and River's hands - where we
> underwent transition from hosting customer to internet service
> provider (or at least - equal peer to ISPs) ourselves. We have our
> independent autonomous systems both in Europe and US - allowing to
> pick best available connectivity options, resolve routing glitches,
> and get free traffic peering at internet exchanges. That provides
> quite lots of flexibility, of course, at the cost of more work and
> skills required.

This is cool; I had no idea.  Is there a longer description of how it works?

< Though it would
> be possible to reach out into multiple donated hosting places, that
> would just lead to slower service for our users, and someone would
> still have to pay for the bandwidth. As we are pushing nearly 4 Gbps
> of traffic, there're not much donors who wouldn't feel such traffic.

Any offers of support from multiple really big donated hosting places?


> Of course, MediaWiki is still one of most actively developed web
> software - and here Brion and Tim lead the volunteers, as well, as
> spend their days and nights in the code.

Are there recent stats on the # of reusers, sites, contributors;
mediawiki extension variants / repositories outside the main tree?

< Quite a lot of problems we hit are very
> huge-site-specific, and even if other huge shops hit them, we're the
> ones that are always free to release our changes and fixes. Still,
> colleagues from other shops are willing to assist us too :)

Ditto for stats on # and quality of patches from colleagues from other
shops.  Is there a wall of huge-site-heroes for those who release
their patches?

feeling stated,
SJ