December 2021 - Cloud - lists.wikimedia.org

[Cloud-announce] Eliminating Debian Stretch in Cloud VPS
by Andrew Bogott 14 Oct '22

14 Oct '22

Debian Stretch's security support ends in mid 2022, and the Foundation's OS policy already discourages use of existing Stretch machines. That means that it's time for all project admins to start rebuilding your VMs with Bullseye (or, if you must, Buster.) Any webservices running in Kubernetes created in the last year or two are most likely using Buster images already, so there's no action needed for those. Older kubernetes jobs should be refreshed to use more modern images whenever possible. If you are still using the grid engine for webservices, we strongly encourage you to migrate your jobs to Kubernetes. For other grid uses, watch this space for future announcements about grid engine migration; we don't yet have a solution prepared for that. Details about the what and why for this process can be found here: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Stretch_deprecation Here is the deprecation timeline: March 2021: Stretch VM creation disabled in most projects July 6, 2021: Active support of Stretch ends, Stretch moves into LTS <- You are Here -> January 1st, 2022: Stretch VM creation disabled in all projects, deprecation nagging begins in earnest. Stretch alternatives will be available for tool migration in Toolforge May 1, 2022: All active Stretch VMs will be shut down (but not deleted) by WMCS admins. This includes Toolforge grid exec nodes. June 30, 2022: LTS support for Debian Stretch ends, all Stretch VMs will be deleted by WMCS admins _______________________________________________ Cloud-announce mailing list -- cloud-announce(a)lists.wikimedia.org List information: https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/cloud-announce.lists.wikimedia.…

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[Cloud-announce] Fwd: Cloud VPS users, please claim your projects (and, introducing Komla)
by Seyram Komla Sapaty 05 Jan '22

05 Jan '22

Hello cloud-vps users, There are still about 84 unclaimed projects at https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Cloud_VPS_2021_Purge Please take a moment to look at that page and mark projects that you are using. Unclaimed projects will be in danger of shutdown on February 1st, 2022. Thank you to those of you who have already acted on this. Thank you! - Komla -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Cloud VPS users, please claim your projects (and, introducing Komla) Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2021 14:42:08 -0600 From: Andrew Bogott <abogott(a)wikimedia.org> <abogott(a)wikimedia.org> Reply-To: abogott(a)wikimedia.org Organization: The Wikimedia Foundation To: Cloud-announce(a)lists.wikimedia.org CC: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Hello cloud-vps users! It's time for our annual cleanup of unused projects and resources. Our new developer advocate Komla Sapaty will be guiding this process; please respond promptly to his emails and do your best to make him feel welcome! Every year or so the Cloud Services team tries to identify and clean up unused projects and VMs. We do this via an opt-in process: anyone can mark a project as 'in use,' and that project will be preserved for another year. I've created a wiki page that lists all existing projects, here: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Cloud_VPS_2021_Purge If you are a VPS user, please visit that page and mark any projects that you use as {{Used}}. Note that it's not necessary for you to be a project admin to mark something -- if you know that you're currently using a resource and want to keep using it, go ahead and mark it accordingly. If you /are/ a project admin, please take a moment to mark which VMs are or aren't used in your projects. When February arrives, I will shut down and begin the process of reclaiming resources from unused projects. If you think you use a VPS project but aren't sure which, I encourage you to poke around on https://tools.wmflabs.org/openstack-browser/ to see what looks familiar. Worst case, just email cloud(a)lists.wikimedia.org with a description of your use case and we'll sort it out there. Exclusive toolforge users are free to ignore this email and future related things. Thank you! -Andrew and the WMCS team _______________________________________________ Cloud-announce mailing list -- cloud-announce(a)lists.wikimedia.org List information: https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/cloud-announce.lists.wikimedia.…

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Mounting Toolforge on local Linux machine
by Huji Lee 29 Dec '21

29 Dec '21

Hi all, I had previously found a way to mount the home directory of my tool on Toolforge onto my local Linux machine using a *mount* command. It was so handy that I turned it into a bash alias and used it on the daily. Sadly, due to a hardware malfunction, I lost my machine and my .bash_aliases file with it. I cannot find the mount command anywhere on Wikitech wiki either. Do you happen to know what the command should look like? It is just so much more convenient to mount the drive and use local IDEs to modify code. PS: I promise to add it to the wiki so others can use it Thanks, Huji

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https://www.google.com
by Seksun Komsan 27 Dec '21

27 Dec '21

Ok

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Storage options: NFS, Cinder, Ceph, Swift?
by Sascha Brawer 23 Dec '21

23 Dec '21

Dear Wikimedia cloud support What storage options does the Wikimedia cloud have? Can external developers (i.e. people not employed by the Wikimedia foundation) write to Cinder and/or Swift? Either from Toolforge or from Cloud VPS? See below for context. (Actually, is this the right list, or should I ask elsewhere?) For Wikidata QRank [https://qrank.toolforge.org/], I run a cronjob on the toolforge Kubernetes cluster. The cronjob mainly works on Wikidata dumps and anonymized Wikimedia access logs, which it reads from the NFS-mounted /public/dumps/public directory. Currently, the job produces 40 internal files with a total size of 21G; these files need to be preserved between individual cronjob runs. (In a forthcoming version of the cronjob, this will grow to ~200 files with a total size of ~40G). For storing these intermediate files, Cinder might be a good solution. However, afaik Cinder isn’t available on Toolforge. Therefore, I’m currently storing the intermediate files in the account’s home directory on NFS. Presumably (but not sure, but speculating because I’ve seen NFS crumbling elsewhere) Wikimedia’s NFS server will be easily overloaded; in any case, Wikimedia’s NFS server seems to protect itself by throttling access. Because of the throttling, the cronjob is slow when working with its intermediate files. * Will Cinder be made available to Toolforge users? When? * Or should I move from Toolforge to Cloud-VPS, so I can store my intermediate files on Cinder? * Or should I store my intermediate files in some object storage? Swift? Ceph? Something else? * Is access to Cinder and Swift subject to the same throttling as NFS? Or will moving away from NFS increase the available I/O throughput? The final output of the QRank system is a single file, currently ~100M in size but eventually growing to ~1G. When the cronjob has computed a fresh version of its output, it deletes any old outputs from previous runs (with the exception of the previous last two versions, which are kept around internally for debugging). Typical users are other bots or external pipelines who need a signal for prioritizing Wikidata entities, not end users on the web. Users typically check for updates with HTTP HEAD, or with conditional HTTP GET requests (using the standard If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match headers). Currently, I’m serving the output file with a custom-written HTTP server that runs as a web service on Toolforge behind Toolforge’s nginx instance. My server reads its content from the NFS-mounted home directory that’s getting populated by the cronjob. Now, it’s not exactly a great idea to serve large data files from NFS, but afaik it’s the only option available in the Wikimedia cloud, at least for Toolforge users. Of course I might be wrong. * Should I move from Toolforge to Cloud-VPS, so I can serve my final output files from Cinder instead of NFS? * Or should I rather store my final output files in some object storage? Swift? Ceph? Something else? * Or is NFS just fine, even if the size of my data grows from 100M to 1G+? The cronjob also uses ~5G of temporary files in /tmp, which it deletes towards the end of each run. The temp files are used for external sorting, so all access is sequential. I’m not sure where these temporary files currently sit when running on Toolforge Kubernetes. Given their volume, I presume that the tmpfs of the Kubernetes nodes will eventually run out of memory and then fall back to disk, but I wouldn’t know how to find this out. _If_ the backing store disk for tmpfs eventually ends up being mounted on NFS, it sounds wasteful for the poor NFS server;, especially since the files get deleted at job completion. In that case, I’d love to save common resources by using a local disk. (It doesn’t have to be an SSD; a spinning hard drive would be fine, given the sequential access pattern). But I’m not sure how to set this up on Toolforge Kubernetes, and I couldn’t find docs on wikitech. Actually, this might be a micro-optimization, so perhaps not worth the trouble. But then, I’d like to be nice with the precious shared resources in the Wikimedia cloud. Sorry that I couldn’t find the answers online. While searching, I came across the following pointers: – https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ceph: This page has a warning that it’s probably “no longer true”. If the warning is correct, perhaps the page could be deleted entirely? Or maybe it could link to the current docs? – https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Swift: This sounds perfect, but the page doesn’t mention how the files are getting populated, what the ACLs are managed, and if Wikimedia’s Swift cluster is even accessible to external developers. – https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Media_storage: This seems current (I guess?), but the page doesn’t mention if/how external Toolforge/Cloud-VPS users may upload objects, or if this is just for the current users. Thanks for your help, and happy holidays, — Sascha, sascha(a)brawer.ch

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Who is ${user_agent} ?
by Platonides 20 Dec '21

20 Dec '21

Hello everyone We have noticed that since Septembrer 2020, our WLM-related site www.wikilm.es has been receiving a couple of meta=siteinfo api queries per day from Cloud VPS NAT egress 185.15.56.1 with a user agent of... ${user_agent} (yes, literally that. Probably a case of single quotes when double were needed) It's probably some kind of Wiki Loves Monuments statistics tool. I have looked on some suspects with no luck. Anyone has an idea which tool may be doing that? Regards

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Save the date! Coolest Tool Award 2021: Friday, January 14th, 17:00 UTC
by Andre Klapper 17 Dec '21

17 Dec '21

Hi everyone! The second edition of the Coolest Tool Award https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Coolest_Tool_Award will happen online on Friday 14 January 2022 at 17:00 UTC! See https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1642179615 for your timezone. The awarded tools will be showcased in a virtual event, with broadcasted video and chat channels for socializing. We will send more details and links soon. Save the date, and join us celebrating the great work volunteer developers do for the Wikimedia communities. We hope to see you there! andre, for the Coolest Tool Academy 2021 -- Andre Klapper (he/him) | Bugwrangler / Developer Advocate https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/

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Eliminating Debian Stretch in Cloud VPS
by Tim Moody 16 Dec '21

16 Dec '21

What's the best way to do this? I noticed a rebuild instance option and tried it to upgrade to bullseye. It processed for awhile, rebooted, and says the instance based on the bullseye image, but I don't see that it upgraded anything. Tim

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Looking for new maintainer for packagist-mirror.wmcloud.org
by Kunal Mehta 10 Dec '21

10 Dec '21

Hi, <https://packagist-mirror.wmcloud.org/> is exactly what it sounds like, a mirror of the metadata on packagist.org. It's very simple, just a systemd timer and some Apache config. Since setting it up 2 or 3 years ago I've barely had to touch it. And based on access logs, some people are actually using it (though we never switched CI over to it, as the idea/goal once was). But after being reminded about it by the current Cloud VPS cleanup, I'm not interested in running this anymore. packagist.org is actually open source (*looks at npmjs.com in sadness*) and hasn't had any reliability issues recently AFAIR. There's also a bit of work to do, the VM needs to be upgraded from stretch, and it should be switched over to the new composer/mirror script from upstream. So if someone would like to take it over, comment on <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T296968> and I'm happy to add you and explain how it works. Otherwise please consider this notice that I intend to shut it down at the end of the year. -- Legoktm

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Source command not working with zsh
by Huji Lee 05 Dec '21

05 Dec '21

Hi all, Starting Nov 7, a number of the jobs I would run through Toolforge grid have stopped working. Each job consists of a .sh file like this <https://github.com/PersianWikipedia/fawikibot/blob/master/HujiBot/grid/jobs…> on the first line of which I use the source command to activate a python virtual environment. When I run source by hand, subsequent lines work. But when I call the .sh file and it tries to run the source command, I get a "source: not found" message, the virtual environment does not get activated and indeed running *which python* returns */usr/bin/python* which is bad. All my scripts depend on pip packages that are installed in the virtual env and not available with the system python. The main thing I did on Nov 7 was to add a line at the end of my too's account's .bash_profile as below: exec zsh This is because when I manually log into toolforge, I would like zsh to be my shell, and since tool accounts don't support chsh, I thought executing zsh directly from bash would be okay. But apparently, that now breaks the source command somehow. So I wonder: (a) Is there a way to properly change the default shell of tool accounts? (b) Is there a way to make *source* work under zsh? Importantly, I know the problem is with *exec zsh* because once I removed it and logged out and back in, all scripts worked correctly. Thanks, Huji

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Cloud December 2021