User talk:68.233.214.74/signpost idea

On Wednesday, 19 April 2017, at 14:00 (UTC), all MediaWiki wikis will be in read-only mode for about 20-30 minutes. This is because the WMF will be switching over to the secondary data center in Dallas, Texas.

This is a planned test, and it is to make sure that MediaWiki wikis can stay online after a disaster. It is planned to show the feasibility of switching from one data center to the other.

The traffic will switch back on Wednesday, 3 May 2017 at 14:00 (UTC). This will also cause read-only mode for 20-30 minutes.

Schedule
A partial schedule of events, adapted from here is:
 * 1) First, they will stop the job queues in active sites.
 * 2) Next, they will deploy mediawiki-config w/ all shards set to read-only.
 * 3) Then, they will lock down the database masters.
 * 4) After that, the active datacenter configuration will be switched.
 * 5) This will continue with applying configuration.
 * 6) Then they will undo read-only mode.
 * 7) After that, a few quick tests from the new server, and back to editable version.

To send traffic stats back to the normal data center, they will do the transfer back following roughly the same schedule.

Technical problems
A problem with this? The non essential code deployments aren't happening.

From the Signpost
Thanks for the submission above. It would have been a worthy item if we had been publishing on a reasonable schedule; unfortunately, we were not. I'll try to find out how well the test went, and rewrite to reflect the results, since an announcement is no longer relevant. -Pete Forsyth (talk) 18:37, 9 May 2017 (UTC)