On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 11:49 AM, Siebrand Mazeland (WMF) < smazeland@wikimedia.org> wrote:
- How can I get access to this environment, so I can fiddle with it,
too (or is this done through "test puppet changes" or something?
Depends on what you mean by 'access' and 'fiddle'.
Beta labs is configured from the same git project as production, except that there is a CommonSettings-wmflabs.php file, db-wmflabs.php file etc. that override the production settings where desired. For example, you can see my recent commit to CommonSettings-wmflabs.php from two days ago that enabled AFTv5 for 100% of beta enwiki in the queue here: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=operations%2Fmediawiki-config.git;a=...
- Is it possible to simply clone another one of these environments,
and if so, how is that done?
My understanding is that there are still a few live hacks in place yet to be managed, but since the vast majority of the environment is managed from puppet and the config is in git, that should be possible. I'm not sure of the mechanism by which to accomplish it, though. Cloning beta labs is not a topic we've considered so far.