On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 1:32 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
The recent extended unavailability of database dumps is an example of serious failure, but failures like this happen when an organization is understaffed/underresourced and only able to focus on the immediate, not the longer term. And whether you agree with this or not, WMF's mission extends beyond operating the websites, and it's performed arguably insufficiently poorly in other categories, such as keeping up with a dramatically changing technology environment, and supporting and growing the free knowledge movement world-wide.
I don't think the dumps are a good example, because after all it's not the first time it has happened with the dumps (don't quote me on that exactly), But I know for sure it has for sure happened to the MediaWiki release tarballs, I can't find the posts in the archive but i vaguely remember discussion occurred on how it could be prevented and I do believe it was mentioned that at least just the current/latest version of the dumps were going to stored on another storage array.
No one thought about outreaching to somewhere like Amazon to have our dumps included in the services (AWS for example for the Amazon)? Because I know a AWS instance[1] was started but has been updated since 2009 since we don't output it in a format that they can use[2]
[1]. http://aws.amazon.com/datasets/2506 [2]. https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=181620%F0%AC%95%B4