Yea, there are good reasons to run independant servers. There are also good reaons to keep everything in one place.
The uptime of the cluster in Amsterdam isn't that good, an other site would probably not be much better, but it could be alive while the TS' in Amsterdam are dead.
While some parts of the system may be down, we didn't have a long downtime of everything for quite a while now. What does happen is that db replication breaks, somtimes so badly that we need to re-import. That takes long. This will hopefull improve seen, stay tuned for a blog post later today :)
Also, there are probably legal reasons for using a local server for some type of material, especial regarding privacy but probably also due to copyright. If something is within the laws about privacy in Norway it is necessary to know who gets access to the data, which we do not know in Amsterdam.
Yes, if you keep private info there, this is an issue. We try not to.
Another example is a server for a chapter-only website, with read only access after logon for members.
Absolutely. I wouldn't put anything like that on a box with user access. WMDE's chapter wiki and internal tools are not hosted on the toolserver bot at a commercial hoster in Germany.
And at last, sometime it seems like the wmde-admins simply ain't responsive. Why that is so I don't know, but it is nearly impossible to run a project when you can't get in touch with the server admins.
Well, it's a volunteer project, so there's no guarantee that anyone does anything. But... have you tried lately? In addition to me (i suck as an admin), River and DaB, we have simetrical and werdna now, and avar for OSM-Related stuff. I think the situation has become much better compared to, say, a year ago.
Anyway - I can see that if you have a sponsor to give the hardware, a place to put them and the people to maintain them, it's faster and easier to just set them up and run them. And I'm happy if it works.
I would suggest though that we should set up some means of exchanging info between the different projects of that kind - to my knowledge, there'S the boxes in poland, now in norway, and wmde's toolserver. Do you know of more? What would be a good way to communicate? Yet another mailing list?
-- daniel
Daniel Kinzler wrote:
Adam Dodek Michalik schrieb:
2009/7/29 Andrew Garrett agarrett@wikimedia.org:
The German toolserver is in the same rack as the European proxies, but it's not better because edits and API requests have to go to Tampa.
So it seems it's not any faster to run bots form German Toolserver than from our own, local one, as long as you don't use the database - am I right? Many people use TS to run their bots on it - including myself. Wouldn't some local TSs help balance the load?
More servers to run bots on would be a good thing. From a technical point of view, it would be better to have all of them in the same cluster, so user accounts and secondary services (svn, jira, etc) can be shared and administrative overhead is minimized.
The only reasons *not* to do that are political/financial. IF those could be resolved, that would be great. If not, then yes, having another place to run bots is still good.
-- daniel
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