TWiki Project Resources

During the recent panic on d.t.o I discovered that we don't appear to have a list of the resources the TWiki project uses/depends on. So I thought we should start one (and keep it up to date, please, admins!). I'm probably going to get this wrong, which shows how much this page is needed.

Current Resources

twiki.org - TheNewTWikiDotOrgServer

• Hardware: Sun v240 Dual proc, 4G RAM
• Software: Solaris
• Hosted by: fastmetrics
• Admin(s): PeterThoeny, SvenDowideit, MichaelDaum
• Purpose: hosts this site

Newly donated Servers for TWiki.org

• Donated by Sun, TWIKI.NET, Plug & Play:
  • Cisco load balancer
  • 2 x web server: 4 GB RAM, AMD, Solaris
  • Storage server: 2 GB RAM, AMD, Solaris, RAID 1, mirrored, 250GB each
• Linked icons on TWiki.org homepage to Sun, Plug & Play, TWIKI.NET (sponsors of hardware & hosting)
• Link to TWIKI.NET home from TWiki download page, text: "Commercial supported version, visit sponsor at TWIKI.NET"

develop.twiki.org

• Hardware: AMD Athlon 3000+, 80GB HD, 1GB RAM
• Software: Centos 4
• Hosted by: FastServers
• Admin(s): SvenDowideit, CrawfordCurrie, PeterThoeny
• Purpose:
  • Hosts the TWiki subversion repository
  • Hosts a MAIN branch twiki install, refreshed from subversion every few minutes, mainly used for running the Bugs web but also for bleeding-edge testing
• Notes: mirrors its authentication information from twiki.org

merlin.lavrsen.dk

• Hardware: Bamboo Pentium IV 1.6 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 150 GB HD
• Software: Fedora Core 4
• Hosted by: KennethLavrsen on ADSL line
• Admin is: KennethLavrsen
• Purpose:
  • Hosts a MAIN branch twiki install, updated from SVN hourly at xx:30.
  • Hosts latest Patch branch twiki install, updated from SVN hourly at xx:00
  • Via virtual machine used for testing MAIN and Patch with perl 5.6.1 (VM not yet publicly available)
• Machine is due to be upgraded to Centos 5 in June 07.

WIBNIF we had:

• Somewhere to run the unit test suite on a regular cycle, and report the results. Perhaps a range of VM's with:
  • Perl 5.6
  • Perl 5.8
  • Various versions of suspect CPAN modules
• Somewhere to test plugins. It would be neat to have a host where we can use scripting to remotely create a TWiki, install plugins, test them, and then kill the install again. Would also be really cool for demos etc.

-- Contributors: CrawfordCurrie, SvenDowideit, KennethLavrsen

Further details about the administration of the new servers are yet to be fleshed out. At the moment, TWiki appears to have a Server administration team (over all the servers) of - CrawfordCurrie, SvenDowideit, KennethLavrsen, PeterThoeny, OliverKrueger, KwangErnLiew.

Which sounds like we have enough people to implement the geo-distributed TWiki we've always wanted.

The Plan

In the long term, we have a number of people with servers around the world, who have expressed interest in helping distribute TWiki.org's load. This will ensure response times that are by far faster for non US users than silo-ing the server in one place.

so..

1. move the TWiki.org twiki from the Sun v240 server, onto the new server cluster
   • put all of the apache & twiki cfg's into TWikiSubversion? so that we can colaborate and learn from others.
2. change the static pub files to be served from a seperate pub.twiki.org (use the v240...)
3. begin to distribute the static files load,
   • by regularly syncing them to other servers - Sven, Oliver, Koen etc have spare bandwidth that they can use
   • change pub.twiki.org to use DNS round robin, or even beter, to use geo location based choices so that the static files come from the physically closest server
4. mirror the TWiki.org topics to do the same thing.
5. BONUS points re-implement it all to use a distributed multi-way edit store

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