Hi folks,
based on the poll at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Travel_Guide/Launch , Stefan's go-ahead, and the potential significant delays that we'd incur if we deferred [*], I'm going to be bold and I'm authorizing the launch this week as originally planned.
Here's what this will mean:
* Hans is preparing database dumps tonight. Any wiki will need to go into read-only mode the moment dumps are being kicked off, and will need to remain in read-only mode on the old server. WTS, SHARED, GENERAL and ASSOC are exempt from this as they'll not be migrated as-such. They can remain editable for purposes such as tagging content statuses.
* We're still waiting for the registrar of wikivoyage.org to finalize the transfer. We've aimed to accelerate this process as much as possible, but to some extent it's ouside of our control. We hope that the transfer will be completed tomorrow. Worst case scenario is that the wikis under wikivoyage.org will be read-only for a few more days. (There are technical workarounds to access the new site if this happens, which we will post if needed.)
* Tomorrow and Wednesday we'll spend a lot of time debugging the imports and the new site functions. A lot of things will incrementally be fixed so don't be surprised if things are a bit bumpy at first.
* The site will be configured to use Commons as its media repository, so any files referenced from there will work. Other files will need to be uploaded either to Commons or to the local wiki under the non-free content policy.
* We'll run a sitenotice that explains that the site is in beta, how to access pages on the old server, and how to help report bugs and fix issues.
* wikivoyage-old.org WILL WORK to access the old sites for as long as needed.
It's going to be a bit of a bumpy ride, so please bear with us.
Thanks much for your understanding and support in getting the word out.
All best, Erik
[*] We'd have to either schedule a window into Hans' upcoming long travel through the US and Mexico, or ensure that we've got all the procedures reviewed and tested by Wikivoyage's other administrators. It would be possible, but I think most people really would like to see this project move forward without entering a long window of uncertainty.
Hi all,
and here an update from the ops side, for those who are interested in the technical/server side details and what has been happening in the background.
* Loadbalancing: once we actually switch to production, you will be served by your own Loadbalancer called wikivoyage-lb.wikimedia.org
wikivoyage-lb.wikimedia.org is an alias for wikivoyage-lb.eqiad.wikimedia.org. wikivoyage-lb.eqiad.wikimedia.org has address 208.80.154.243 wikivoyage-lb.eqiad.wikimedia.org has IPv6 address 2620:0:861:ed1a::13
the "eqiad" part tells you that currently you are being served from the "Equinix (EQ) data center near Washington Dulles (IAD)". It will be possible to serve users from a different data center based on their geo location if needed, or fail-over, and yes, it will support IPv6 too.
* SSL: as soon as we successfully transferred the domain we can order a wildcard *.wikivoyage.org SSL cert then you will have https one all wikis and without warnings for self-signed certs, and this will be handled by SSL proxies, the Apache backends just need to talk HTTP
* DNS: the 3 Wikimedia DNS servers are ns0, ns1 and ns2.wikimedia.org. They are configured to have zones for wikivoyage-old.org , wikivoyage.org and wikivoyage.de. The latter 2 are currently just links to wikivoyage-old.org and that we setup to point back to your servers (america and asia) just like before. Once we get the .org and/or .de domain we will change those to point to our loadbalancers but of course leave the -old domain as it is. So your old servers will always be accessible under the wikivoyage-old.org domain.
*MySQL: we will host you on cluster "s3" and there will be 1 master and 8 slaves, 4 per data center (one in US, one in Europe), who replicate. Our whole database tree can be seen here for the curious: http://noc.wikimedia.org/dbtree/
As Erik pointed out please bear with us if not everything is perfect within the first day, but i really hope you can (soon) appreciate the new features of a current Mediawiki, secure connections, uniform URLs for all wikis, loadbalancing, IPv6 etc.
Let me point out that (almost) all of our server configs involved are also publicly viewable, clonable and everyone who is interested is welcome to submit patches to our code review. (git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/p/operations/puppet | https://labsconsole.wikimedia.org/wiki/Git)
The stuff above is in the operations-puppet repo, Loadbalancer: lvs.pp SSL: protoproxy.pp MySQL: mysql.pp .. ). These are "Puppet" manifests.
Also anyone interested will be able to use Wikimedia Labs to test things yourself on virtual machines. (http://labs.wikimedia.org).
Finally let me add that personally i am a travel enthusiastic myself, just moved from Germany to S.F. and used your wikis (yeah, as a reader) long before i heard anything about a move to the WMF or worked here. So for me there won't be a strict separation between "the wmf" and "the community" and it is great to be involved in a new project start at the wmf, especially if it is a wiki about travel, yay! That also doesn't happen every day here;)
Hope we can have fun with the new stuff and get the images done together quickly. We will be pretty busy the next days, but also feel free to drop in on IRC (Freenode , #wikimedia-tech) if you want to report issues in realtime.
See you on the wikis,
On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 6:04 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
- We're still waiting for the registrar of wikivoyage.org to finalize
the transfer.
This part is now done. wikivoyage.org is owned by WMF now, with WMF nameservers. It's currently pointing back to the old site until we're ready to make the switch, at which point wikivoyage.org will be the new site & wikivoyage-old.org the old one.
Erik
Keeping you posted as we go.
We've set up all initial databases (without content) on the WMF side of things, and Hans is sequentially going through the wikis and producing dumps. We've done the first production import of the frwikivoyage database. We're experiencing some issues with transferred passwords not working which we're currently debugging.
We'll switch over wikivoyage.org once all wikis are imported. After that it'll still take a while for the nameserver change to propagate, but we'll post a quick how-to for technical users on how to accelerate it on your system.
Erik
Also, in addition to being read-only, the old sites will be intermittently unreachable as Hans creates the dumps -- in part due to the server load, and due to the dump processing work he has to do, e.g. changing usernames who have not opted into the data transfer but who've not previously been renamed (double migrations are fun ;-).
Erik
On 06/11/12 16:30, Erik Moeller wrote:
We'll switch over wikivoyage.org once all wikis are imported. After that it'll still take a while for the nameserver change to propagate, but we'll post a quick how-to for technical users on how to accelerate it on your system.
Hopefully you've set time-to-live to something ridiculously short on these DNS records?
That's what dyndns servers usually do. :)
On Tue, Nov 06, 2012, carlb wrote:
Hopefully you've set time-to-live to something ridiculously short on these DNS records?
dig says it's one hour, which isn't too bad. This seems to be standard for all WMF sites though, with Wikipedia for example on the same timeout.
$ dig en.wikivoyage.org @ns0.wikimedia.org
;; QUESTION SECTION: ;en.wikivoyage.org. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION: en.wikivoyage.org. 3600 IN CNAME america.wikivoyage.org. america.wikivoyage.org. 3600 IN A 5.9.71.41
-Mary
wikivoyage-l@lists.wikimedia.org