Good news! I'm buying Wikipedia a new and much more powerful server.
Bomis.com needs a new server in our web cluster. As it turns out, ross.bomis.com (the current wikipedia server) is physically identical to our existing servers in our web cluster (because I bought ross at the same time), and is therefore ideal to include in the web cluster without complicating my load balancing over there.
This means that the newly purchased server, which should be here in a couple of weeks, will be set up exclusively for wikipedia. I will be moving personal websites of mine (like jimmywales.com and kirawales.com) and experimental websites of mine OFF this machine, but not to the new machine.
The new machine will be setup with different root password, and no real connection to the rest of my network. This means that I can give developers Unix shell accounts on the machine, and even the root password in some cases.
The new machine will be a dual Athlon with 2 gig of ram and a much bigger SCSI harddrive than what we have now. The performance of the machine should be a lot better than the existing single PIII with 1 gig of ram.
This will all come to pass in the next couple of weeks. This will remove me as a key bottleneck in the development/release cycle.
--Jimbo