Jason and I are taking stock of our hardware, and I'm going to find a
secondary machine to devote exclusively to doing apache for wikipedia,
i.e. with no other websites on it or anything. I'll loan the machine
to the Wikipedia Foundation until the Foundation has money to buy a
new machine later on this year.
We'll keep the MYSQL where it is, on the powerful machine. The new
machine will be no slouch, either.
Today is Friday, and I think we'll have to wait for Jason to take a
trip to San Diego next week sometime (or the week following) to get
this all setup. (The machine I have in mind is actually in need of
minor repair right now.)
By having this new machine be exclusively wikipedia, I can give the
developers access to it, which is a good thing.
This will *not* involve a "failover to read-only" mechanism, I guess,
but then, it's still going to be a major improvement -- such a
mechanism is really a band-aid on a fundamental problem, anyway.
------
Lots of people think it's a good thing to set up mirror servers all
over the Internet. It's really not that simple. There are issues of
organizational trust with user data, issues with network latency, etc.
Some things should be decentralized, some things should be
centralized.