Last week in Wikimedia tech

Some highlights…

Software:

• The Collection extension for PDF generation from wiki pages has been enabled on all Wikibooks wikis for further testing. It remains experimental, but is pretty handy already!
• Welcome new dev Trevor Parscal at Wikimedia’s San Francisco office! Trevor is cutting his teeth on an edit draft saving/recovery extension.
• We’ve caught up on code review and restarted standard update schedule of MediaWiki on the cluster. There have been a few hiccups affecting some bot tools, mostly fixed.

Cluster issues:

• Tim’s been fixing up some of our monitoring systems and cleaning up some backlog on crashed/weirdly configured machines.
• We’ve continued to see some intermittent issues with image thumbnail rendering since re-establishing a normalized configuration for the image scaler machines. Tim has been poking at these to sort the problems out.
• There have been issues with timeline generation, not yet resolved, probably caused by changed configurations of ploticus and/or fonts on new web server installations.

In the data center:

• Some issues with our primary image file server — a kernel crash during debugging, and a disk replacement (RAID wins again!)
• Rob and Mark have been setting up our new expansion data center in Tampa, at Switch & Data. This gives us additional space and cooling power needed to expand our server base, which means more disk space for media files and backups. We like backups!
• Mark has researched plans for our future data center migrations in Amsterdam, which we’ll be finalizing over the coming weeks.

At the office:

• David Strauss has been visiting us in SF a lot to get our CiviCRM donation-tracking backend ready for the fundraiser.
• Tomasz has been fixing up CentralNotice with multiple message scheduling and a localization helper interface in preparation for the fundraiser. Coordination with designers and the CRM stuff is ongoing. :)
• Welcome new dev and office IT folk Ariel Glenn! Ariel’s a longtime Wikipedian and Wiktionarian. At the moment Ariel’s working on some of the IT backlog at the office, getting the lay of the land and beefing up our backup procedures.

Updated spelling 2008-10-27