John Tex wrote:
Recently, enwiki was apparently moved without warning to a new server. This caused the external toolserver to be unable to perform any analysis of enwiki information. One of the major users of toolserver is Gmaxwell, who performs several different beneficial processes using the toolserver.
He has posted to WikiTech-L explaining what happened and what the effects are: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034904.html
There is also an essay forming at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Toolserver
I urge everyone to visit one or both of the above links to learn more and to express your support for getting the situation resolved.
We're way ahead of you. To improve the administrative situation, two more people have been given root access: Gregory Maxwell (who you mention above) and DaB. Mark Bergsma will be installing a new external disk array within the next week, hopefully giving the toolserver enough disk space and power to replicate all databases. Please be patient.
It was down altogether for a few hours today. If I understand correctly, this was due to a planned reboot for maintenance and some subsequent problems getting it to come back up.
-- Tim Starling