John at Darkstar wrote: Aha, so there is a Norwegian toolserver? To what extent is it sponsored by the chapter? Can Swedish users get accounts? -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

Yes, its the one. I'm not sure if its imposed any restrictions on user accounts, but I don't think so. The server is sponsored by a company selling PC's and related equipment, and it is located in a facility for the municipality and city Tønsberg in Norway. The admin (Laaknor) who made the deal works there. You may contact the user himself at http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Laaknor http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Laaknor John Erling Blad Wikimedia Norway Casey Brown wrote:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Wolfgang ten Weges: i don't think we're short of resources at the moment. - river.

John at Darkstar <vacuum(a)jeb.no> wrote: Why? If a chapter can pay a hosting company for their servi- ces with a donation, they should be able to pay WMDE for their services as well. There is no need to "move a donation to another jurisdiction". In the end, I do not think that hardware ressources are an issue with the (current) toolserver. With the backup data- base servers on the horizon, replication should become more than good enough. What needs to be done, and River has pointed repeatedly in that direction, is to work on the tools themselves: Make them "stable", make them user-friend- ly, identify stuff that should better be integrated into Me- diaWiki (interwiki bots, Templatetiger, Geohack, etc.), etc. Tim

Gerald A <geraldablists(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'm not aware of any such restriction, and in the 27 coun- tries south of Norway they would probably be illegal anyhow. But maybe I'm just biased as a German member of a German Verein that pays for hosting in not-so-German Amsterdam - as long as the charitable goals are achieved, I don't see a problem. Tim

As soon as there is cash flow from one chapter to another, you are affectively moving donations from a jurisdiction to another. On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 19:04, Aryeh Gregor<Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote: WM DE is a non-profit, so the problem is not there. Or I didn't understand your statement. The question has a lot to do with what we do. As you point out, hardware is an asset, and it is harder to file as "mission oriented" to start with, wherever it is located. On top of that, some countries have restrictions inherent to their non-profit legal frame. Regardless of the donor's point of view, which, with good PR, can always be turned around to show that supporting the German tolserver is within the mission, the money simply cannot go to "another organisation", because it implies legal ties or afiliations that are hard to translate into "mission oriented" projects. Moving cash around in the non-profit world is really complicated. As far as i know, for example, most of the donations that Wikimedia PL receives come with strings attached, and Wikimedia PL can only spend that money _within Poland_. None of their doing, it's the law, you can't do anything about it. It goes with their non-profit status. In France, for example, it would take a lot of explaining to the tax office to say why we're "funding" Wikimedia Deutschland, but it would all depend on the amount (and the percentage of the chapter's financial means it represents). My take is that as chapters grow, it will be easier to fund the German toolserver as the amounts needed will be smaller for each chapter (relatively) and can be more easily explained to the national tax offices. Spot on, this is the headache we're facing. Too many cooks spoil the broth. Efficiency is reduced if you have to go to X for one machine, and Z for the next one. Delphine (who knows nothing about toolservers, but a little more about chapters and chapters' finances ;-)) -- ~notafish NB. This gmail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails will get lost. Intercultural musings: Ceci n'est pas une endive - http://blog.notanendive.org

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 00:33, Daniel Schwen<lists(a)schwen.de> wrote: Not all donations come within this frame. I hope I'm not saying anything wrong here, as this is the way I have understood it, but there is a special way a charity can get donations in Poland, and that is through people's income tax. To make a long story short, at the end of the fiscal year as a tax payer in poland, you have the possibility to decide that 1% (or some other %?) of your income tax goes to a designated charity (approved by the tax office). Donations received through this mean are to be spent in Poland. Charities can also fundraise in various other ways and the donations coming through those other channels do not come with those strings attached. Not all charities are "designated charities", although they can still have tax-deductible status. Which should answer your disbelief... charities in Poland _can_ spend their money elsewhere than in Poland, if it does not come through this 1%. Delphine -- ~notafish NB. This gmail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails will get lost. Intercultural musings: Ceci n'est pas une endive - http://blog.notanendive.org

Right - and I think the fist reason sucks and the second is a good reason. Ironically, the second problem is probably easier to overcome. if, when and how charities can transfer/donate to organizations in another country seems to be an issue for the lawyers. *sigh* -- daniel

On 28/07/2009, at 10:55 PM, Artur Fijałkowski wrote: The German toolserver is in the same rack as the European proxies, but it's not better because edits and API requests have to go to Tampa. -- Andrew Garrett agarrett(a)wikimedia.org http://werdn.us/

2009/7/29 Adam Dodek Michalik <dodecki(a)gmail.com> Maybe. The editing load would still be in Tampa. Mighta be that multiple TSes would still be faster as there is more RAM for the pywikibot stuff. Marco -- VMSoft GbR Nabburger Str. 15 81737 München Geschäftsführer: Marco Schuster, Volker Hemmert http://vmsoft-gbr.de

There are several other reasons. The uptime of the cluster in Amsterdam isn't that good, an other site would probably not be much better, but it could be alive while the TS' in Amsterdam are dead. Also, there are probably legal reasons for using a local server for some type of material, especial regarding privacy but probably also due to copyright. If something is within the laws about privacy in Norway it is necessary to know who gets access to the data, which we do not know in Amsterdam. Another example is a server for a chapter-only website, with read only access after logon for members. And at last, sometime it seems like the wmde-admins simply ain't responsive. Why that is so I don't know, but it is nearly impossible to run a project when you can't get in touch with the server admins. John Daniel Kinzler wrote:

Perhaps there could be some kind of central management of some kind. One thing is distribution of the open databases. It should not be necessary to set up replication for each and every toolserver. Some kind of central authentication so access can be federated perhaps, yet authorization should be enforced locally. But then perhaps we could use the same facility if the internal access rules on the various servers could be more stringent, that is a Norwegian server is for Norwegian use only - even if its located in the cluster. More like a webhotel with server hosting for chapters. Now, make it even more general and say virtual servers for the chapters own use and make them off-limit for other bot operators. Still, note that such a server, virtual or not, has to be under complete control of the individual chapter. Even sharing backup tapes could be troublesome. I don't think another mailing list is necessary. If a toolserver-box is used for something else that need higher confidentiality then it should go on a local chapter list or something similar. John

Kerberos authentication. Easier than pubkeys, and more secure. Fahad Sadah 2009/7/29 John at Darkstar <vacuum(a)jeb.no>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 River Tarnell: one other problem with password authentication: many users do use the same one for different sites, even if it's a bad idea. if the Toolserver was compromised, and we used Kerberos auth, an attacker could easily install a trojaned ssh server or client which recorded every user's password, and then use those passwords to attack other sites. (this is how Apache.org was compromised, except it was SF with the trojaned SSH instead of the Toolserver.) conversely, with public keys, an evil server cannot do anything to compromise the security of the private key, since it's never sent to the server. - river.