News
Amusing Mobile Feedback
“We have just launched this site… please send us your feedback!” When we added these words to the top of 1/5th of the mobile pages, we began a barrage of feedback to the mobile list. So much so that, we had to make a second list just for this kind of feedback. That certainly wasn’t [...]
PMTPA Router Reboot – Scheduled Downtime (Resolved)
Our primary router for the pmtpa cluster had to be rebooted today at 12:00 GMT. A line card had died and needed replacing, and the
system required a reboot for it to fully take effect. Once that finished, CentralNotice was adding a lot of overhead and had to be disabled for our caching cluster to catch [...]
SVG for all… with Flash?
For several years, we’ve supported uploading SVG vector images to Wikimedia sites… with the limitation that they would be rendered to static PNG raster images when actually used inline.
This gives our editors great flexibility in editing
Scaling Wikipedia Mobile
Some of the things I learned about new projects and scaling issues.
BTW, I think we can settle that Ruby applications don’t have to be slow. Far from it.
Follow me on Twitter @hcatlin or @WikimediaMobile
We’re adding an off site archive for Commons and the XML snapshots
Thanks are due to eBart consulting and User:Milosh for proving a backup server and storage array at their colocation facility in Europe. This server will store archives of our publicly available data of Wikimedia Commons and the XML snapshots.
Everyone knows that this has been long and coming as having an off site location for our [...]
Internal updates: moving files around
We’re now running all Wikimedia sites on our internal deployment branch of MediaWiki, so we’ve got a consistent record of what software we’re running and can more easily test it offline. There were a couple brief glitches during the switchover
ESAMS Servers not reachable, some EU traffic affected. (Fixed!)
Starting approx. 03:20 GMT, servers in our ESAMS facility began to roll offline one after another. After some investigation, it appea
rs power is not being supplied to all the servers. This has resulted in some slow downs for traffic of EU
Uploads temporarily offline for site fix (done!)
Uploading and generation of new thumbs will be temporarily disabled on Wikimedia sites while we patch & reboot the server to fix the performance issues we’ve been seeing.
We hope to be done within a couple hours (by 22:00 UTC or so — 3pm PDT), but it could run shorter or longer.
Rough procedure for the curious:
Take [...]
PDF export service temporarily down (fixed)
Wikimedia’s PDF export service is temporarily down; the server failed to reboot after a routine kernel upgrade. It should be resolved or replaced with a spare box within a couple hours…
Update: Server is back online.
PDF Export currently down (fixed)
Our PDF export server is presently down. It had to be rebooted to organize and route some power cables in our racks. When it powered back on, it is failing to load all software correctly. We are working on resolving it, I just wanted to post something here on the blog since it is the [...]