[Toolserver-l] Next level of stabilization

[River Tarnell]

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i've read your mail twice, but i don't really understand what sort of answers
you're looking for.  you seem to be more interested in the people side of the
problem, e.g. how we can get more people to contribute; is that correct?

if you have specific technical questions/problems, i can answer those, or
explain why things are as they are.

as far as resources go: yes, we're short of money.  we have just about enough
to keep the toolserver running most of the time, but with more money it could
be a lot more reliable (and faster).  we are also very short of admin time, in
part because the WMF won't allow us to add any more admins until they've moved
their private databases to a new cluster, which is taking a long time.  (Werdna
recently gained access to those databases by working for the WMF, which is why
we were able to give him root access.)

i've started asking other chapters for funding; our ZWS license was purchased
by wikimedia.fr, for example.  but this is a slow process, and most chapters
want to know exact (or at least roughly accurate) figures before they can
decide whether they can help.  this means we need to know what we want, and
that means someone (which will probably end up being me) needs to sit down and
work it out.

the main problem with having chapters buy stuff is most countries restrict how
a non-profit organisation can transfer funds/assets, in most cases forbidding
them to simply buy hardware and give it to the WMF or wikimedia.de.  this means
we could end up with 20 servers, each owned by a different chapter, which makes
support/RMA/etc. a nightmare.

	- river.
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