I originally thought the new server would be up long before the new software was ready, but it didn't work out that way. Jim's moving and other things has let the server sit idle, and the new codebase is just a few hours away from completion.

I originally thought the new server would be up long before the new software was ready, but it didn't work out that way. Jim's moving and other things has let the server sit idle, and the new codebase is just a few hours away from completion. This gives us an opportunity, and I'd like to suggest a course of action here and see what the group thinks (especially Jimbo if he's reading, and Jason). One thing that has become clear to me that despite all my pleas, QA testing for the new software has been woefully inadequate. I'll make another pass, and give it a few more days myself, but the only way to get good testing is the foist it upon the Wikipedia community at large. The new server gives us an opportunity to do that in a way that gives us an emergency fallback--the old server. So here's what I suggest: I'll create the transition plan and scripts, and test them out on the new server. We'll have one round of QA for people to test the new software in situ, but during which the old server will still be the active site. Then we clean it up and do the transition for real, making the new server live. New code, new server all at once. My best estimate is that transition time, during which the old Wikipedia will be accessible but read-only, should be 2-3 hours, so we should pick a low-demand time for it. If the transition fails immediately, we just abandon it and go back to the old server, and try again later. If it succeeds initially, but after a few days we dicover something drastically wrong, we can still go back to the old server, updating the database with the changes of those few days (for which I have prepared a script). If everything goes well, then after a week or two Bomis can recycle the old server and we're upand running. Jimbo, Jason, I also went ahead and installed MySQL/PHP/Apache on the new server from source (after testing all of them on my server first-- and yes, that includes this week's Apache security fix). My notes on exactly what I did are in /home/lee/src/README on the server, and the sources are in /usr/local/src. Please review the installation and see if it's what you had in mind, or let me know what differences you envision. I would also like your feedback on any details of the wiki software installation you have in mind (directories, etc.) 0