Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-04-09/Technology report


 * A small correction about Labs and storage: Labs has two storage clusters. One we've had since the Labs launch, which is "instance storage". Instance storage is for storing instance images (virtual machine images). The second cluster was the one added recently, which we call "project storage". Project storage is accessible from within instances, and is divided from a security perspective by project (hence project storage). We had a couple outages due to the instance storage, not the project storage. A full outage of the project storage would cause issues with data access in Labs, but even a small outage of the instance storage will cause major issues for all of Labs, since the instances (virtual machines) would lose access to their local disks and would crash (like a server's disks dying).Ryan lane (talk) 00:58, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Ah, thanks for the correction Ryan. I admit I completely missed the project/instance division. I've tweaked the wording used above accordingly. - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 08:32, 10 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Just a question: how many datacenters are there and where are they located? Night of the Big Wind  talk  11:46, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Unless I'm mistaken, there are two "proper" data centres: one in Tampa, Florida and one in Ashburn, Virginia, which is a relatively recent addition. There's also a caching centre in Amsterdam to help European audiences. There used to be additional caching facilities in Seoul and Paris for some years, though hosts at both locations were later decommissioned (presumably because their benefactors were no longer able to maintain them). - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 11:51, 10 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Adjusted two instances of "Wikimedia" to "MediaWiki" when it was clear the reference was to the software. This includes the headline. Nathan  T 14:23, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
 * The headline is fixed at publication, so I'll have to change that back (it gets reprinted elsewhere). I'd argue it was merely ambiguous rather than wrong: "Wikimedia deployment" here being shorthand from "deployment of the latest version of MediaWiki to Wikimedia sites". I've preserved your clarification of the prose, naturally. - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 16:54, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
 * I suppose... the point is that "Wikimedia" isn't something that gets deployed, and the software MediaWiki is used in a variety of other settings. MediaWiki to Wikimedia sites would be conceptually correct; Wikimedia to Wikimedia sites, aside from not making sense, promotes a misunderstanding of the relationship between the Wikimedia projects and the software platform. Nathan  T 19:39, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree that "Wikimedia deployment" is hardly ideal, but nothing else proved short enough for a headline :) I'm not sure any regular reader would not understand the MediaWiki-Wikimedia divide, however. Anywhoo, not worth arguing over. T'is done. - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 20:32, 10 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Regarding the proposal to replace gerrit, I fail to understand where "the initial reception was largely negative" comes from. Reading the thread, it seems that all but one of the responses were actually quite encouraging and commending (at most, somewhat cautious). --Waldir talk 16:40, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, it depends what you describe as negative and what as positive. Personally, I would say that a positive response would have been "you've got my/our full support", and that the actual response was (rightly or wrongly) quite a long way away from that. But yes, perhaps "mixed" would have been better. - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 13:08, 15 April 2012 (UTC)