A few of us have been discussing how awesome it would be to use
MediaWiki-Vagrant[1] to create a portable production-like environment. This
would give Mediawiki engineers a common ground from which to develop core
code and/or extensions, and by coming close to mimicking Wikimedia's
production environment, would hopefully reduce the amount of friction
around getting features out to production. Also, this is something that we
would be able to pre-package this for new engineers - imagine handing a new
MediaWiki engineer a USB stick with an up-to-date MediaWiki-Vagrant
instance that closely mimics production at say, a future hackathon.
We started chatting about what it would take to get us there, and
identified some initial steps that we'd like to tackle at the Zürich
Hackathon - namely, turning a few puppetized production services into roles
that we could use in MediaWiki-Vagrant.
We've created a corresponding 'topic' on the Hackathon's topic page[2] to
describe what we'd like to achieve at the Hackathon. Please review,
comment, and certainly add yourself as an 'interested person' if this
catches your fancy and you plan to attend the hackathon.
--
Arthur Richards
Software Engineer, Mobile
[[User:Awjrichards]]
IRC: awjr
+1-415-839-6885 x6687
Hi,
I am a junior year student at IIIT Hyderabad and a GSOC wannabe. I wen't
through the ideas page and found some of them interesting, especially *Tools
for mass migration of legacy translated wiki content*.
My skill set includes C++, python, java(basic), PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript
,Web2py(basic), Django(moderate), Ruby on Rails (basic). Some of my
projects can be found at https://github.com/akashagarwal.
*I wan't to start getting familiar with Wikimedia and explore possible
projects for GSOC. Please guide me on where to start.*
Thanking you,
--
Akash Agarwal
UG - 3
B-Tech, Computer Science
IIIT Hyderabad
+919652722676
Any idea what is going on with Toolserver? I've noticed several times over the
past few days that it's been very slow to run tools, or just non-functional at
all, giving a 502 error.
With the Steward elections going on, I suspect a lot of people will be trying to
make use of the tool at [0] to check their eligibility to vote.
Is there a bug in bugzilla that I might be able to watch? Or is this a new
issue?
Thank you,
Derric Atzrott
[1] https://toolserver.org/~pathoschild/accounteligibility/?event=31
Reminder: if you want to come to Wikimania in London this August (where a
lot of people will be hacking together), and you need help with money for
travel or lodging, apply for a scholarship
https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Scholarships by
Monday the 17th.
You'll get a decision by early April.
You are eligible, regardless of age and location.
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gerrit/Reports stopped updating for a few
days due to <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/60940> as far as I can tell.
For now I've just disabled checking changes that have a status of "closed".
The reports should resume updating daily, but some of the reports will
likely be incomplete or inaccurate until this bug is fixed.
If anyone would like to take over the maintenance of these Gerrit reports,
they're yours for the taking. I'll even throw in a free bot account. :-)
MZMcBride
I'm pleased to announce that Faidon Liambotis has been promoted to Principal Operations Engineer.
From the very first week he was hired, Faidon has expressed great interest in understanding and improving the complete infrastructure stack of the Wikimedia Foundation, covering not only the domain of the Operations team, but far beyond. I distinctly remember how, a few days after he was hired (which at the time, I didn't take any part in), he approached me for the first time on IRC and said:
"Hi Mark! Nice to meet you. I see you just wrote this nice new director for consistent URL hashing to backends in Varnish. Let me help you get that upstreamed!"
I believe in that same week he fixed some bugs in our nginx setup and solved our scalability issues with Puppet's external (Nagios) resources, amongst other things.
Ever since, Faidon has taken on many projects, large and small, and completed them in ways going far beyond his duties. He has spent enormous amounts of time reviewing other people's patch sets, discussing their ideas, and mentoring them in their work. He's instrumental in coordinating efforts across multiple groups and making sure everyone arrives at the best possible solution. In discussions he's noticed for being analytical and methodical, and calmly working towards a common goal. This is reflected in his architecting work too, where he contributes with sensible ideas and a great knowledge of the open source software and solutions landscape.
Outside of Wikimedia, Faidon has been active in Debian and other open source projects since 2004. He cares deeply about our use of open source solutions and helping our software extensions get upstreamed and made available to others.
I think it's only appropriate that we recognize his role with this promotion.
The biggest problem we may have with him is that he works too much and is involved with almost everything. Fortunately that is a good fit for his new role. :)
Please join me in congratulating Faidon.
—
Mark Bergsma <mark(a)wikimedia.org>
Lead Operations Architect
Acting Director of Technical Operations
Wikimedia Foundation
FYI
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Greg Grossmeier <greg(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 3:25 PM
Subject: Outage report - Feb 6th - Math
To: Development and Operations engineers <engineering(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation/20140206-Math
Important bits:
== Summary ==
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/104991/ changed the parser cache keys
for pages with <math> in them, causing a spike in cache misses and thus
the cluster feel over.
This has been slowly rolling out on small wikis, mostly unnoticed since
math isn't widely used there. Rolling out today to larger wikis (dewiki,
etc) caused the cache stampede to be more obvious and cause downtime.
Reverting the change didn't work because of incompatibilities between
core + the extension, but was ok because we had mostly gotten through
the invalidation before the roll back.
This would've been a problem if we weren't having fatals, we would've
started invalidating to the old version again. We got lucky. Going back
to new version caused a little more invalidations, but seems reasonable
and should level off soon probably
== Conclusions ==
We really need to process through the backlog of Math extension
changesets from physikerwelt who's done great work on the extension but
is lacking review.
== Actionables ==
* wrap Math stuff in PoolCounter so it doesn't kill apaches so easily.
* More review on recent changes to Math. Be careful in rolling this
* release out further.
** PoolCounter: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/111916/
--
| Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E |
| identi.ca: @greg A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |