On 18/03/11 11:19, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 6:38 AM, Roan Kattouw
<roan.kattouw(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Normal shell users can execute all but one of the
steps required for
wiki creation: root access is needed to create the DNS entry for the
new subdomain.
Why doesn't Wikimedia just set up a wildcard domain for
*.wikipedia.org? They all go to the same IP address anyway, right?
Just have the application (maybe Squid) return a 404 if the project
doesn't exist.
We used to have a wildcard domain, but Mark removed it when he took
over maintenance of the DNS system many years ago, replacing it with a
fixed list of CNAMEs based on the language list. Apparently wildcard
domains in CNAMEs are not allowed by the spec or cause problems with
some clients or something.
Compared to the other things roots have to do, adding a few entries to
langlist and running the update script is trivial, so I think
developing tools to open this up to more users would be a misuse of
time. The difficult things with wiki creation are:
* Finding the bug reports for wiki creations, or remembering to look
at a list at appropriate intervals.
* Working out which wiki creation requests are properly approved by
whatever process it is that we have at the moment.
* Interpreting the vague requests by the incubator users for special
configuration of the new wiki.
If there is a non-root user who is prepared to do these things, an IRC
private message to a root user should be enough to get the DNS changes
done in a matter of seconds.
-- Tim Starling