Wikimedia Engineering/Report/2011/July

Major news this month include:

Recent events

 * OSCON (July 25-29, Portland, Oregon, USA) —

Upcoming events

 * Wikimania (August 2-7, Haifa, Israel) —


 * Check out the Software deployments page on the wikitech wiki for up-to-date information on the upcoming deployments to Wikimedia sites.

Job openings
Are you looking to work for Wikimedia? We have a lot of hiring coming up, and we really love talking to active community members about these roles. The following positions have opened this month:
 * Product Manager (Mobile)
 * Software Developer (Mobile)

New RfP:
 * RFP/Article Feedback Feature

Open requests for proposals: The following positions are still open: Product Manager (Analytics), QA Lead, Operations Engineer (Networking), Director of Features Engineering), Software Developer (Features), Systems Engineer (Data Analytics), Operations Engineer, Networking Contractor (Amsterdam), Software Developer (Rich Text Editing, Features), Product Manager (Features), Software Developer (Front-end) and Software Developer (Back-end).
 * Internationalization and Localization Outreach
 * Internationalization and Localization Feature Development
 * Ben Hartshorne (Ops)
 * Daniel Zahn (Ops)

Short news

 * Jeff Green, "Special ops" http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-June/054122.html, foundation:Job openings/Operations Engineer - Special Projects
 * Ben Hartshorne
 * Daniel Zahn (contractor)
 * Ian Baker, http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-July/054180.html, Software Developer (Features)
 * Code maintenance engineer Priyanka Dhanda left the Wikimedia Foundation in July.

Site infrastructure
- Installed one of the two new Juniper routers and replaced the Foundry core switch. Details are available on - http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Planned_Maintenance-July_13_2011 - Purchased 74 new servers. This is to add capacity to our current apache cluster. Rack and stack will begin in August. - Updated the Fundraising servers with latest security patches. - Upgraded and puppetize 'Grosley' and 'LimeSurvey' servers - Upgraded the Amsterdam's Squid instances, which the fixed memory leak issue. The Tampa servers are being updated now. - Standardized the LVS infrastructure, enabling BGP for all of them as well as create the standard LVS puppet manifest. - Replaced and upgraded the servers for LimeSurvey and Grosley
 * Tampa Data Center (Highlights)

—
 * Virginia Data Center


 * Media Storage —  All the major functionality  such as Download, Upload, Re-Upload, Revert, Delete, and Restore, is in place (and checked into SVN, so feel free to take a look).  Next is to work on unit tests and perform end-to-end tests.


 * HTTPS & IPv6 — HTTPS is now enabled on officewiki, for dog-fooding. Protocol-relative URLs were enabled on testwiki for community testing before rolling out to all projects.

Testing environment

 * Virtualization test cluster —

Backups and data archives

 * Data Dumps — It looks like the kinks may finally be worked out of the system after the OS upgrade and move to new hardware.  A remount of nfs with different options and cutting the number of jobs back to a few less than 32 may have done the trick, or it may have been luck, but the July run of English WIkipedia completed with no need to rerun anything.  The June run of English Wikipedia is also complete finally, and the August run is under way.  Back runs of Chinese Wikipedia have been patched up, so now it's back to getting the code done for checkpoint files of history dumps, which will allow us to save out files after every 12 hours or a day and rerun only those pieces affected if something breaks.


 * Backups —

Editing tools

 * Visual editor —
 * FlaggedRevs maintenance —


 * Non-Roman character set localization —

Content Quality and Editorial Tools

 * Article feedback —

Participation and editor retention

 * WikiLove —


 * MoodBar —


 * StructuredProfile —


 * LiquidThreads 3.0 —

Multimedia Tools

 * UploadWizard —

MediaWiki infrastructure

 * ResourceLoader —

Wikimedia Labs

 * TimedMediaHandler —


 * Parser  — Brion Vibber continued to work on the ParserPlayground extension, which is now a mostly working demo. He's now focusing on the API between the parser/renderer and its host environment (read more).

Mobile

 * Mobile Research —


 * MobileFrontend —

Fundraising support

 * 2011 Fundraiser —

Offline

 * Wikipedia version tools —


 * Collections —


 * Kiwix UX initiative —

MediaWiki Core

 * MediaWiki 1.18 —
 * Code review management —
 * Heterogeneous deployment —
 * Disk-backed object cache —
 * API maintenance —


 * Shell requests —


 * Continuous integration —
 * Projects on hold — The HipHop deployment, AcademicAccess, App-level monitoring and Configuration management projects were mostly on hold in July.

Wikimedia analytics

 * Wikimedia Report Card 2.0 —

Technical Liaison; Developer Relations

 * Bug management —
 * Summer of Code 2011 —


 * Engineering project documentation —
 * Volunteer coordination and outreach —