Hi,
We discussed a bit yesterday in #mediawiki some features of toolserver and
their availability on labs in the future, I know that wikimedia labs are
still not being used for application hosting (wikipedia bots etc.) so I
think that it would be cool to expand this discussion also to this mailing
list.
I started a list of "wanted features" as Sumanah asked me for here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Projects/Wikimedia_Labs/Toolserver_featur…
so
please insert some other requested stuff there if you think that something
is missing (I am pretty sure there are many things which I forgot to
mention).
I have absolutely no clue how this part of labs is going to be designed but
I think that having several instances shared between bot operators (similar
fashion as current toolserver is designed) with shared storage for /home
between servers would make sense. Having separate instance for each bot
operator would IMHO eat too much system resources (bots need just few mb of
ram, os needs hundreds), maybe some more complicated bots could have own
dedicated instance if there were needs to have some system customizations.
Concerning features, I told Ryan yesterday that most of users would
probably appreciate to have possibility to at least forward system mail to
their own e-mail boxes (atm most of accounts on toolserver have their mail
forwarded to account owner e-mail), however Ryan told me that there are
some security implications so I don't know if this could be possible in
future.
Another thing I forgot to mention was that toolserver application servers
allow users to access directly their own www folder, so that bots can
produce some output which can be accessed from outside (example:
http://toolserver.org/~petrb/logs) this could be also problem because
virtual servers don't have public ip, so maybe it would be cool if we had
some public www server which would be connected to same storage as /home
folders of those application instances (probably accessible directly from
wmflabs.org).
Any ideas? Thanks!