i'm the senior Unix administrator for the Toolserver project. i'm mostly involved in the WMF side, and i haven't done much with the OSM stuff. however, i have been observing the progress of the OSM Toolserver (cassini), since that is ostensibly part of the Toolserver cluster, and i have a few concerns.
firstly, i'd like to see proper integration between the OSM and WMF parts of the Toolserver. for example, someone has configured a web server on cassini, and people are already deploying tools at http://cassini.toolserver.org/~username/. it should be clear why using "cassini.toolserver.org" in a URL is a bad idea; but i don't see why cassini needs to host user tools at all.
the Toolserver already has a web server which works quite well, and has plenty of spare resources. by putting OSM user tools there, we can combine resources and make efficient use of them; if/when the web server is full, we can add additional resources and both WMF and OSM users will immediately be able to take advantage of them. (i understand OSM needs some special Apache module for serving tiles; keeping that on cassini probably makes sense.)
it's also not clear to me whether cassini needs to be a login server at all; the WMF databases at the TS don't allow user login, and users connect to them remotely. is there something special about OSM tools that prevents them from running on the existing TS login servers?
secondly, in the rush to deploy cassini as quickly as possible, it seems that little planning has been done. one thing we've learnt from the Toolserver is that it's a lot less effort to plan things properly from the start, instead of deploying something, then discovering it has to be redone later. might i suggest that people take a step back, consider what exactly the "OSM Toolserver" is meant to be, and come up a plan before going any further?
Hi. I'm the senior administrator for Cassini, evidently :)
I'm in complete agreement with everything you suggest. It makes much more sense to use cassini as a backend server that provides map-specific stuff such as PostGIS databases and other remote services while other servers handle user login and serving web requests.
The reason this isn't the case is (as far as I know) a bit of a turf conflict between Wikimedia Germany and the rest of the Toolserver cluster. WMDE paid for "A Map Toolserver" and got me to admin it. I only agreed to admin it because I needed some hardware to test the MediaWiki embedding of OpenStreetMap maps, I really don't have time to properly do it, nor am I familiar enough with the Toolserver cluster/procedures to do it in the time that I have.
The current setup on Cassini is the outgrowth of a hack I set up to have something to present for Wikimania 2009. The things that are currently going on on it are test replications of the OSM database which people like Peter Körner who are interested in writing map tools need to get their job done.
There have been a few threads on this mailing list and/or #ts-admins (can't find them now) suggesting that we re-arrange the architecture as you suggest. But for some reason we don't have that yet.
So who needs to give the OK before we can do things as you suggest? It's completely clear to anyone who's looked at the current architecture that it's completely non-optimal and an obstacle to providing mapping services to Toolserver users.