(anonymous) wrote:
I also don't think that a lot of familiarization for new roots is necessary. After all, the servers don't run on magic, but on software, and if you are able to find your way around JIRA, or OSM, or something else that needs attention, you are very probably skilled enough to read and under- stand configuration files and code.
Trust me, the toolserver is a *little* bit more complex than your machine at home. It is a full-grown cluster with more than a dozen hosts, a SAN- infrastructure, HA-services and everything is mixed with Solaris and Debian. I have more than 20 years of computer-experience, but I needed over a year to understood everything (and I still discover new things from time to time).
Does someone need to understand all that to fix JIRA?
On Labs, which is scheduled to have replicated databases by the end of the month, there is no such barrier, and it may become increas- ingly difficult to convince volunteers to invest any time in the toolserver.
In this case you should just wait until the end of the month and than switch to labs, leaving the toolserver with all its problems behind. Just for clarification: I do not have "convince" people to come to the toolserver, they come by alone. And we will see how many users are eager to leave if Wikilabs is ever working.
Apparently, they don't come on their own. The last admin to join (before Nosy) was Reedy about two years ago, and with his contract with WMF I don't know if he could really be counted as "volunteer" :-). Since then, there have been no new unpaid admins, while the number of users and thus the admins' workload seems to have been increasing constantly.
Tim