Monthly report/2012-05

Hello all, this is the second monthly report of the toolserver.

SAN-System
After some more work by Mark at the beginning of the month the SAN-system (that's a disc-system in a network) is fully redundant now. Some more testing by the roots is still needed, but more or less the SAN-extending is done.

More memory
The WMDE-chapter has bought some memory for some userland-servers and the HA- nodes. Most of these systems are short of memory, so that should help us (in case of the HA-nodes the memory-extending should make the nodes all HA again, because at the moment if one of the node is away, the other crashs soon after because of memory-shortness). The memory will be installed at the next visit of Mark in the datacenter – this will cause some downtime (the roots hope to learn about the visit soon enough so that we can message you all).

Quota
The roots are working to get the quota-system back in action. At the moment many users do not have any quota (because of a bug in the account-creation- script) and our disc-space for /home is quite full already. If you have a free minute (no matter if you have a quota or not) please look in your home if there are files which you not longer need and delete them (that's also good for the backup-system); a good candidate are log- or tmp-files. Another mail will be send as soon as the roots started to fix the quota-system.

Interwikibot-ban
Since 15th May the interwiki-bot-ban is finally in place. All long-running bots are now run by the MMP interwikibot, which is organized by Toto Azéro at the moment. I disabled some bots already that were still running.

Hardware-buying back at the WMDE
After some disagreements between the WMDE and me about the funding and the future of the toolserver (and the buying of new servers), I moved the responsibility of hardware-buying back to the WMDE. So WMDE will decide if and what hardware we will get in future (so complain there when you think the TS is too slow).

Still waiting for dumps
We are still waiting for dumps of s6 (soon we will reach the 2-month-mark) and s2.

How to make MMPs more popular
There is a discussion [1] going on the mailinglist about making MMPs more popular; some think that a renaming would be a good idea while others think that making non-MMPs more unpopular would be a better way.
 * [1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/toolserver-l/2012-May/004977.html

SGE-upgrade/Linux will come back soon
Merlissimo compiled/installed successfully a upgrade of SGE in parallel to the old installation. We will do the switch soon (I will send a announcement-mail before that) and when the switch is done I will enable the login on the linux- boxes (yarrow and nightshade) again.

User-statistic
The TS has 377 active users at the moment.

The next monthly report will be send around 1. July. If you would like to help in the creation-process, please see [1].
 * [1] https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Monthly_report

Sincerely, DaB.