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.…
(If you don’t work with links tables such as templatelinks, pagelinks and
so on, feel free to ignore this message)
TLDR: The schema of links tables (starting with templatelinks) will change
to have numeric id pointing to linktarget table instead of repeating
namespace and title.
Hello,
The current schema and storage of most links tables are: page id (the
source), namespace id of the target link and title of the target. For
example, if a page with id of 1 uses Template:Foo, the row in the database
would be 1, 6, and Foo (Template namespace has id of 6)
Repeating the target’s title is not sustainable, for example more than half
of Wikimedia Commons database is just three links tables. The sheer size of
these tables makes a considerable portion of all queries slower, backups
and dumps taking longer and taking much more space than needed due to
unnecessary duplication. In Wikimedia Commons, on average a title is
duplicated around 100 times for templatelinks and around 20 times for
pagelinks. The numbers for other wikis depend on the usage patterns.
Moving forward, these tables will be normalized, meaning a typical row will
hold mapping of page id to linktarget id instead. Linktarget is a new table
deployed in production and contains immutable records of namespace id and
string. The major differences between page and linktarget tables are: 1-
linktarget values won’t change (unlike page records that change with page
move) 2- linktarget values can point to non-existent pages (=red links).
The first table being done is templatelinks, then pagelinks, imagelinks and
categorylinks will follow. During the migration phase both values will be
accessible but we will turn off writing to the old columns once the values
are backfilled and switched to be read from the new schema. We will
announce any major changes beforehand but this is to let you know these
changes are coming.
While the normalization of all links tables will take several years to
finish, templatelinks will finish in the next few months and is the most
pressing one.
So if you:
-
… rely on the schema of these tables in cloud replicas, you will need to
change your tools.
-
… rely on dumps of these tables, you will need to change your scripts.
Currently, templatelinks writes to both data schemes for new rows in most
wikis. This week we will start backfilling the data with the new schema but
it will take months to finish in large wikis.
You can keep track of the general long-term work in
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T300222 and the specific work for
templatelinks in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T299417. You can also
read more on the reasoning in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T222224.
Thanks
--
*Amir Sarabadani (he/him)*
Staff Database Architect
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hello,
As part of the WP 1.0 bot/tool project, we are no longer using webservices
or grid/cron jobs on Toolforge. However we still access the English
Wikipedia replica database and our tool specific database hosted on
tools.db.svc.wikimedia.cloud.
It has been suggested by team members that we delete our toolforge account
since we're not using any resources on the toolforge server. However my
question is: Would we still be able to access the databases mentioned
above? If there's a lighter weight way of accessing those databases without
having a toolforge login we'd be interested in that as well.
Thanks,
-Travis
There are still dozens of VMs in cloud-vps running Debian Stretch. All
of these hosts will need to be deleted and replaced with VMs running
either Buster or Bullseye in the next few months. Beginning in May we
will begin to shut down Stretch instances.
Please check this page for your projects, and take whatever steps are
necessary to move off of Stretch:
https://os-deprecation.toolforge.org/
Don't hesitate to reach out for help on IRC or mailing list if you need
help with this migration. You may find Cinder volumes
(https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Adding_Disk_Space_to_Cloud_VPS_ins…)
especially useful for transferring data between VMs. Note that we do NOT
recommend in-place OS upgrades of VMs; it is almost always better to
start with a fresh host and transfer workloads over.
Details about the what and why for this process can be found here:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Stretch_deprecation
Here is the remaining deprecation timeline:
May 1, 2022: All active Stretch VMs will be shut down (but not deleted)
by WMCS admins.
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.…
Hello Handgod,
We currently do not have the resources to offer the workshop content in
different languages. We are investigating the possibility of taking this up
in future projects. One thing, though, is that we are presently exploring
Google Meet's live captioning feature, and interestingly, it offers
translations in French. As I have not tested this feature myself,
particularly for non-English translations, I am unsure how reliable it is,
something you might want to try out!
Best,
Srishti
*Srishti Sethi*
Senior Developer Advocate
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
On Fri, Apr 15, 2022 at 1:31 PM Handgod Abraham <sambayo23(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks ! Is a French translation planned please ?
>
> Le ven. 15 avr. 2022 à 15:42, Srishti Sethi <ssethi(a)wikimedia.org> a
> écrit :
>
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>>
>> The third workshop on the topic of "Writing Pywikibot scripts" is coming
>> up - it will take place on Friday, April 29th at 16:00 UTC. You can find
>> more details on the workshop and a link to join here: <
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Small_wiki_toolkits/Workshops#How_to_write_…>
>> [1].
>>
>>
>> This workshop will introduce participants to writing basic scripts via
>> the Pywikibot framework. We will be focusing on examples of scripts that
>> participants have requested to cover in the workshop (e.g., finding and
>> replacing content, archiving discussions, etc.). You can add your ideas to
>> the ongoing discussion in the etherpad doc linked from the workshops page. If
>> you missed attending the previous two workshops, going through the workshop
>> materials beforehand would be beneficial.
>>
>>
>> We look forward to your participation!
>>
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Srishti
>>
>>
>> On behalf of the SWT Workshops Organization team
>>
>>
>> [1]
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Small_wiki_toolkits/Workshops#How_to_write_…
>>
>>
>> *Srishti Sethi*
>> Senior Developer Advocate
>> Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines
>> at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
>> Public archives at
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org…
>> To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
>
Is there some heartbeat monitoring system in the Wikimedia cloud?
I’m running a periodic cronjob (on toolforge/kubernetes) that I’d like to
monitor. Ideally, my cronjob could send a heartbeat to some monitoring
system for each successful run. For example, it would send an HTTP POST
request to monitoring.wmcloud.org/mycronjob or whatever. When no heartbeat
has been received for >3 weeks, I’d like to receive an email alert to some
configured email address. Does Wikimedia operate some heartbeat monitoring
system like this?
Best,
— Sascha
Hello all,
It's coming close to the time for annual appointments of community members
to serve on the Code of Conduct committee (CoCC). The Code of Conduct
Committee is a team of five trusted individuals (plus five auxiliary
members) with diverse affiliations responsible for general enforcement of
the Code of conduct for Wikimedia technical spaces. Committee members are
in charge of processing complaints, discussing with the parties affected,
agreeing on resolutions, and following up on their enforcement. For more on
their duties and roles, see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct/Committee.
This is a call for community members interested in volunteering for
appointment to this committee. Volunteers serving in this role should be
experienced Wikimedians or have had experience serving in a similar
position before.
The current committee is doing the selection and will research and discuss
candidates. Six weeks before the beginning of the next Committee term,
meaning 07 May 2022, they will publish their candidate slate (a list of
candidates) on-wiki. The community can provide feedback on these
candidates, via private email to the group choosing the next Committee. The
feedback period will be two weeks. The current Committee will then either
finalize the slate, or update the candidate slate in response to concerns
raised. If the candidate slate changes, there will be another two week
feedback period covering the newly proposed members. After the selections
are finalized, there will be a training period, after which the new
Committee is appointed. The current Committee continues to serve until the
feedback, selection, and training process is complete.
If you are interested in serving on this committee or like to nominate a
candidate, please write an email to techconductcandidates AT wikimedia.org
with details of your experience on the projects, your thoughts on the code
of conduct and the committee and what you hope to bring to the role and
whether you have a preference in being auxiliary or main member of the
committee. The committee consists of five main members plus five auxiliary
members and they will serve for a year; all applications are appreciated
and will be carefully considered. The deadline for applications is *the end
of day on 30 April 2022*.
Please feel free to pass this invitation along to any users who you think
may be qualified and interested.
Best,
Martin Urbanec, on behalf of the Code of Conduct Committee