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Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu

Posted by kdawson on from the all-eggs-one-basket dept.

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!)"

3 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. More surprised at the mess they had before by ACK!! · · Score: 3, Interesting

    For such a large effort, it seems wild they had so many different distros running in their environment.

    What do you guys think?

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    ACK /ak/ interj. 2. [from the comic strip "Bloom County"] An exclamation of surprised disgust, esp. i
  2. CentOS is free RHEL by Hero+Zzyzzx · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So it's unlikely the decisions were influenced heavily from a budgetary standpoint. If they wanted to stay with a free RHEL derivative linux that's essentially identical to the one you pay for, they'd be using CentOS.

    They chose Ubuntu. Maybe they just like it better? I think you can factor cost of out the equation.

    1. Re:CentOS is free RHEL by brion · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Quick note -- we started our standardization to Ubuntu right around the time the first long-term support release (6.06 LTS) came out, offering the promise of much longer-period security updates. This was a big attractor versus continuing to play the Fedora upgrade game. (That is, even if we didn't keep everything at the latest version, we could continue to get necessary updates for old installations.)

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      Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?