Jeroen-
Hello,
Proberly some of you will flame me, but I will
take that for granted.
My idea is to combine all the European language
wikipedia's (except english
and maybe spanish and portuguese) on one server and using one database,
located somewhere in Europe.
Crashes that are so hard that they require someone to do a fix on location
should be expected to take about 24 hours to fix -- that's normal and OK.
The present crash took about 7 hours to fix (we still don't know what
caused it), and it would have taken just a few minutes if I or Tim could
have done the reboot instead of waiting for Jimbo to wake up. Hopefully
Brion will be back soon as well.
Splitting up the wikis can cause the following problems:
* makes software updates harder -- we are trying to move towards a common
codebase
* makes it impossible to combine the different tables into a single
database, which would have various advantages
* makes it more difficult to combine at least user accounts and
interlanguage links into a single DB
* could lead to cultural split -- different power structures, different
policies etc.
Furthermore, Jimbo is in the process of finalizing the Wikimedia
Foundation, which will allow us to take donations. Given enough money, we
can improve our current setup. A reasonably redundant database setup with
replication should be more resistant to this kind of failure.
Realistically, with a decent setup, we don't need to split up our
databases -- it's the single point of failure (pliny) that is the problem,
not that the server is based in the US.
Regards,
which reminds m... Any status update on the wikimedia foundation?? I
know as of know Its officially a non-profit, but still hasn't achieved
IRS tax exempt status. So, where are we with that? Have the papers been
filed, or not? And how many more steps do we have afterwards. It'd be
nice to have an estimated time by when this could be done. Is it going
to take a couple of weeks or a couple of months? Just curious, and eager
to donate....
Lightning