Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu

David Gerard writes "Wikimedia, the organization that runs Wikipedia and associated sites, has moved its server infrastructure entirely to Ubuntu 8.04 from a hodge-podge of Ubuntu, Red Hat, and various Fedora versions. 400 servers were involved and the project has been going on for 2 years. (There's also a small amount of OpenSolaris on the backend. All open source!)"

Comments

Re:did not know that....

[Rik Sweeney]

I did not know that ubuntu was a player in the server market.

http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/serveredition

Re:And?

[Ngarrang]

How is this news?

Well they either should have stuck with 7.10 or waited for 8.10.

That's news...

8.04 is a long-term release. In the world of servers, that counts for something. Also, there were changes from 7.10 to 8.04 that were probably things Wikimedia wanted to take advantage of.

Re:And?

[cyphercell]

the cuticle doesn't properly detach itself from the nail as it grows. The nail's growth slowly tears your skin apart.

Re:More surprised at the mess they had before

[David Gerard]

The first technical person was Brion, who'd done the job as a volunteer for quite a while before that.

I started editing Wikipedia in early 2004. I believe they'd just made the radical jump from one box to three boxes.

Now stuff is structured in a horizontally-expandable fashion. "Add some more Squids." "Add some more Apache servers." So a single platform is an obvious win, and picking one platform to standardise on is actually more important than which of various near-indistinguishable free Unix-like operating systems that could all do the job they pick.

Re:More surprised at the mess they had before

[brion]

That is an entirely accurate summary of the situation. :) We still have a tiny technical staff, and re-organization of things that got thrown together in a hurry long ago is an ongoing task.

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[brion]

Canonical has recently provided us a donated support contract, but that didn't influence our (much earlier) decision to stick with Ubuntu.

Primarily:

• We liked it better
• It's nice that people can run the same version locally (who runs CentOS on their desktop? Playing CentOS vs RHEL just feels like a big fat kludge and tells you there's something broken about the distro.)
• Unlike Debian stable, and like Fedora, it's updated fairly frequently so we get a decent rate of package updates for infrastructure...
• ...unlike Fedora, it's not so bleeding edge that things die all the time (SELinux breaking everything, yay!)
• ...and Canonical actually puts out security updates for a decent amount of time.

Re:How many admins?

[brion]

Mass installation of a customized distro can do better than mass installation of a general distro (eg, the kernel and software can be optimized for your use case).

And indeed, we use a slightly customized Ubuntu, in that we have our own patched versions of some packages (PHP, Squid, MySQL, some custom PHP extensions, etc) tweaked for performance or features we need, plus custom meta-packages to install the configurations we require on different server sub-types.

This is pretty easy to do on any distro with a decent package manager. I still like apt better than yum, though!

Re:Whither OpenSolaris?

[brion]

These are on our new image/media-upload fileservers. We're trying out the wonders of ZFS (snapshotting for consistent backups and "rm -rf oops" protection, potentially filesystem-level replication, etc).

Since they're an isolated service type it's not a *huge* burden to have them be a little funky (eg, we don't randomly have an OpenSolaris box in the middle of the Apache/PHP cluster), though if we could do ZFS on Linux without jumping through scary hoops we'd happily to that instead!

We'll try it out for a while, and if we're happy with it we'll keep using it, if not we'll migrate to something else eventually (the machines should as happily run Ubuntu as they do OpenSolaris)

Re:Simple is good

[moosesocks]

I need to overwhelmingly emphasize that OS X Server is *barely* suitable for a production environment.

I'm a big fan of Apple, and do appreciate the nice GUIs that they provided with OS X Server. However, it's not particularly stable, tends to break at odd intervals, and ignores many common Unix conventions, making it a huge pain to perform certain tasks, or do things not supported by the GUI.

It's a nice start, but I'd be very cautious about adopting it across your entire server infrastructure. Using it to host certain Apple-y apps might be fine, though I'd rely upon Linux/BSD for serious server tasks, especially if you already have the staff/experience to do so.