[Foundation-l] [Toolserver-l] account activity review [IMPORTANT]

[Gregory Maxwell]

I had several emails in my inbox this morning because my tools were
returning incorrect data.

It appears that about 6 hours ago enwiki, and only enwiki, stopped
replicating. I now see that the Wikimedia developers have moved enwiki
to its own cluster without warning or coordination. Not like they'd
have anyone to warn: If I can't contact someone with authority, no
doubt that they are unable as well.

Based on the prior track record I expect this to never be fixed, just
as text replication was never fixed and the replication of the asia
cluster wikis was never fixed.

Toolserver had become mostly useless for many of my projects without
high speed text access, now it is almost completely useless for all of
my projects... and I'm tired of catching flack for the unreliability
of the server. People have depended on the tools I provided, but are
constantly let down by the unreliability of the service.

When I was granted access and when I spent many hours writing software
I had an expectation that someone would be at least trying to maintain
the system. I never expected that it would be ignored, that my work
would go to waste, and that if I offered to do the work I too would be
ignored. When I provided tools that allowed enwiki users to adjust
their processes and work more effectively, I believed that they could
rely on these tools working most of the time. I understand now that I
was mistaken.

I am tired of wasting my time.

Because I can't even expect the nonexistent toolserver administration
to perform the trivial action of turning off my account, I have
deleted my ssh authorized key... thus my account is effectively
disabled.  So don't worry, you can go on doing nothing.

On 4/10/06, kate at zedler.knams.wikimedia.org
<kate at zedler.knams.wikimedia.org> wrote:
> hello,
>
> the account expiration date was originally scheduled for April 1st, but has
> been extended to May 1st.  on this date, all accounts will expire (and no
> longer be usable) except those which have had the expiration date extended.
>
> if you have an account, and you would like to keep it:
>  - if you have one or more working projects, please describe these (preferably
>    with examples, URLs, etc.)
>  - if you do not yet have anything ready (particularly if you're a new user),
>    please describe what you intend to work on.  a rough estimate of when you
>    expect it to be ready would be useful.  if some issue is holding you up
>    (e.g. lack of text access), please mention that.
>
> if you no longer wish to use your account, please say so.
>
> this information should be mailed to <dab at daniel.baur4.info> and cc'd to
> <zedler-admins at wikimedia.org>.  (there's no particular deadline, but if you
> wait until one day before the expiration, you might find that your account
> expires because no-one managed to look at it yet...)