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Jimmy Wales wrote:
I have no particular opinion on the proposal below,
nor does it have
anything directly to do with us, but I was just thinking that for
disasters that are easy to foresee, we might want to think about how we
can be prepared in advance to bring people the information they need.
Is there anything we can do in advance to prepare?
We're so fast anyway, I have no ideas, but I thought I'd pass along the
notion.
<snipped>
Distributed computing is the way to go here. I don't think we'd be able
to maintain full functionality in the event of a major hit on the
Florida servers, but I have some ideas about how we might be able to at
least stay up (sorry if some of these sound stupid or obvious):
* The Paris/Amsterdam/Korea servers (not entirely sure how these are
being used at present) could be put into a "serve cached versions only"
mode as soon as contact with Florida was lost. Anything in the squid
caches (any devs know the percentage of total content?) would still be
viewable.
* Once we have the infrastructure, have entire database backups (or at
least parts of them) scattered around the place so that should Florida
go down for an extended period (or be destroyed completely), everything
would still be safe. I forget what the estimated worth of all the
Wikimedia content is, but I believe it's in the millions of dollars.
* Invest in wireless communications technology and reliable power backup
systems. If major local infrastructure was destroyed (power, data lines)
but the servers themselves were still intact, they would still be useful
if they could be connected with the rest of the internet (even if only
as read-only). With a decent antenna, it should be possible to get 20km
range on a wireless connection, so multiple points could pick up and
statically serve the data.
Of course, these all depend on us having enough money to do this. When
will Wikimedia get its own colocation facility? Or does it have one already?
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