Hi everyone!

tl;dr stop using notebook1001 by Monday April 2nd, use notebook1003 instead.

(If you don’t have production access, you can ignore this email.)

As part of https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T183145, we’ve ordered new hardware to replace the aging notebook1001.  The new servers are ready to go, so we need to schedule a deprecation timeline for notebook1001.  That timeline is Monday April 2nd.  After that, your work on notebook1001 will not longer be accessible.  Instead you should use notebook1003 (or notebook1004).

But there is good news too!  Last week I rsynced everyone’s home directories from notebook1001 over to notebook1003.  I also upgraded the default virtualenv your notebooks run from.  Your notebook files should all be accessible on notebook1003.  However, the version of Python3 changed from 3.4 to 3.5 during this upgrade.  Dependencies that your notebook uses that you installed on notebook1001 may not be available at first.  You might need to redo a pip install those dependencies into the new notebook Python 3.5 virtualenv.  (I can’t really give you explicit instructions to do that, as I don’t know what you use for your notebooks.)

I’ll do a final rsync any newer files in home directories from notebook1001 on Monday April 2nd.  If you’ve been working on notebook1001 since after March 15th, this should get everything up to date on notebook1003 before notebook1001 goes away.  BUT!  Do not work on both notebook1001 and notebook1003!  My final rsync will keep the most recently modified version of files from either server.


OOooOo and there’s even more good news!  I’ve made the notebooks able to access system site packages, and installed a ton of useful packages by default.  pandas, scipy, requests, etc.  If there’s something else you think you might need, let us know.  Or just pip install it into your notebook.

Additionally, pyhive has been installed too, so you should be able to more easily access Hive directly from a python notebook.  

I’ve updated docs at https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/SWAP#Usage, please take a look.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask, either here on or phabricator: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T183145.

- Andrew Otto & Analytics Engineering