Hello,
On Mon, 18 Nov 2013, Merlijn van Deen wrote:
I discussed this with Marc Pelletier (Coren, cc'ed) on #wikimedia-labs this afternoon. The final 'best idea' was the following:
- Let users on the TS redirect their tools to whatever new location
(which would probably be Tool Labs) using .htaccess,
- Expired accounts should then still be allowed to redirect using
.htaccess,
- When the TS goes down, some other server, probably in the TL cluster,
can take over the .htaccess files and keep providing redirects.
Would this (mainly the expired accounts part, which would require changes on the TS side) be acceptable? It would allow users that want redirects to put them in place (in a well-defined manner that will keep working after the TS goes down), without too much effort from the end of the admins of either the TS or TL.
Coren, if I missed/mis-summarized something, please correct me :-)
This sounds like a good and doable idea. Currently the expired accounts get displayed via a global htaccess - we'd have to turn this mechanism off then because if a user is in this global file his home page will not even be accessed by the web server. Thats why I'd have a additional suggestion - expired accounts get a default htaccess in their home directories public_html dir if no htaccess is found. I still then only have the problem that if a account expires and htaccess is not touched for whatever reason the web stuff there stays active. And: if someone burns bridges when done with the move to labs the htaccess file would get currently deleted too - ill discuss this again and think about it (ok we could recode so the file does not get deleted or simply gets appended to the global htaccess file...) ;).
But still - yes - good suggestion.
Cheers Marlen/nosy