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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!)"

8 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Re:did not know that.... by Rik+Sweeney · · Score: 5, Informative

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

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

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    Summation 2
  2. Re:did not know that.... by jedidiah · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    THIS is what makes it "news that matters".

    --
    A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
  3. Re:And? by Ngarrang · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    Bearded Dragon
  4. Re:And? by EvilRyry · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm sure Xorg and KDE4 are high on their priority list for their web servers.

  5. Re:And? by David+Gerard · · Score: 5, Funny

    You wouldn't believe how much nicer Squid and MySQL look in Compiz.

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    http://rocknerd.co.uk
  6. Re:did not know that.... by brion · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, the only difference between "Ubuntu Server Edition" and the "regular" Desktop version is which packages get installed by default.

    That's one of the things we like about Ubuntu -- the 'supported' version (should you want a support contract, or even just security updates for a longer period!) isn't a totally separate distro from what folks use at home.

    When Red Hat split "Red Hat Linux" into "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" (supported, but for $ only) and "Fedora" (free, fast-changing, no long-term security updates), they lost the benefit that techs would likely be running the same version of the software on their desktops and servers.

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    Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?

  7. Re:CentOS is free RHEL by brion · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
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    Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?

  8. Re: Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu by nick+graham · · Score: 5, Funny

    [citation needed]