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.