MediaWiki hosting and development

From wikidev.net

Professional MediaWiki hosting, support and customizations. Standard features:

• Hosting on dedicated servers in Düsseldorf and Berlin/Germany. Gnu/Linux with low load and an uptime >99.9%. Daily off-site backups, no dependency on a single colocation facility/uplink.
• Mail accounts with Imap/Pop3 access, https webmail, Spamassassin
• Squid (http://www.squid-cache.org) cache acceleration for high performance
• Short, clean urls: http://yourdomain.tld/Main_Page instead of http://yourdomain.tld/index.php?title=Main_Page. One domain of your choice included.
• More Technical details

Attention: New wiki registrations are suspended, I'm concentrating on my existing customers. Gabriel Wicke 11:25, 4 Feb 2008 (UTC)

Contact me: Mail (mailto:wicke@wikidev.net) is usually the most convenient way, calling can be faster though. If i don't answer immediately i'm usually at uni (http://www.uni-kiel.de), will call you back asap.

Getting started user documentation and details | Wikis | Development projects

News

• Back up after major hardware problem: The main board and/or the RAM of the server wikidev-1 broke recently after several months of eventless uptime, taking down wikidev.net and several sites hosted on the same machine. Initially the power supply was the suspected cause, but replacing it didn't help. The staff at the colo then moved one of the RAID disks to another WikiDev server where the site is running now. There were some more complications (a lot of data needed to be copied to another machine which took longer than expected), but finally everything is safely back up, at the latest version before the outage (not restored from backup which would discard nearly a full day's worth of content). Live replication can help to cut the downtime after a failure like this drastically, it's not used on the production site yet though. All the hours spent on fixing this problem make for a good motivation to push ahead with such a system..
• 
  23 April: Returned from Spain on Monday- we finished 8th in Palma, our biggest success in five years of 49er sailing ;-) Only one top-25 ranked (http://sailing.org/rankings/publishrankinglist.asp?rankdd=19&rankmm=4&rankyy=2006&rankevents=&clscode=49ER&clsdesc=49er+-+Skiff&ctype=&grd_criteria=&grd_nation=&grd_frompos=&grd_topos=&Skip1=20&AspGridBegin1.x=36&AspGridBegin1.y=10&AspGridBegin1=Begin) team was missing. We shot a lot of pictures and uploaded a few of them at http://49ersailing.de/, along with reports in German.
  Uni was a bit tough this week, catching up on two missed weeks in three days..
  My next wikidev project will be a full upgrade to 1.6, after porting a bunch of customizations over. The new time-based release model without branches should reduce future porting work.
• 28 March: Am on the way to Spain where we'll be practising and racing in the Princess Sophia Trophy in Palma. We'll post reports at http://www.49ersailing.de/. I'll be back after Easter.
• 27 March: This week i worked on the MediaWiki parser and RTL issues in preparation for the MediaWiki 1.6 release. In the process i discovered and fixed a closs-site scripting vulnerability which led to the release of new MediaWiki versions. The changes are integrated in the code running at wikidev.net.
• 14 March: After a rough ride last week with the routing problems and, as it turned out, problems with the driver for a gigabit nic in two servers (fides and leto) things have moved along smoothly again in the last days- wohoo! The driver is patched and recompiled, the internal network is working without problems. Now i can finally test ENBD mirroring over GigE for full server redundancy. I also wrote new scripts to set up wikis, vhosts and DNS entries- the plan is to hook these up to a web ui to automate the wiki setup. On another note, there are some sailing reports (in German) available at http://www.49ersailing.de/.
• 10 March: There were intermittent routing problems in the data center yesterday and today, making parts of the wikidev cluster unavailable from the outside. I'm working with the data center to make sure this does not happen again, likely cutting out one hop in the process. In better news: A new server called aque.wikidev.net was installed today, running Xen-based (http://www.xensource.com/) virtual servers. I've been running Xen domains since October for several customers with good results, prices and details will follow (much cheaper than dedicated).
• 28 Sept '05: Back from sailing (we didn't make the top 16 but are still considered for a spot in the squad) the last three weeks were full of development and sysadmin work, mostly for WikiPress (http://wikipress.wikidev.net). A new server is in preparation as well, more about that later.
• 24 August: I'm sailing the 49er World Championships (http://www.49erworlds2005.ru/) in Moscow until Sept 7th and won't be able to reply to mails too quickly. In emergency please contact me with text messages to my mobile during this period. We hope to make it into the top 16 which would mean qualification for the national squad ;-)
• 5 June: Adjusted Mysql to index words starting with three chars instead of four, so it will find short acronyms too. This caused a few errors initially that were fixed with a rebuild of the searchindex tables.
• 8 April: Shipped Leto to the datacenter, expected online on Monday. Added a few features to Monit, using the opportunity to practice some more Bison/C stuff for uni ;-)
• 7 April: Installed Monit on Sedna and Runner which monitors services and acts in case of failure (restart service, send sms etc). I'm also using it together with Heartbeat and DRBD for the upcoming high-availabilty cluster. 'Lab' tests with two virtual (vmware) servers getting the power cut regularly have gone very well, failover happened in less than five seconds. I've assembled a new server 'Leto' with RAID1 and LVM2 striped partitions for speed which will form a network 0+1 RAID over DRBD, partnering with Fides. In case you're wondering what all those acronyms are good for- they further increase performance, data safety (live replication and lvm snapshots additional to rsync backups) and availability by eliminating single points of failure.
• 25 March: Successfully downgraded PHP one minor version number and installed Eaccelerator, the successor to the no-longer-maintained Turck MMCache. No more workarounds ;-)
  A few benchmarks i did yesterday on my laptop yielded these numbers: MediaWiki1.4/PHP5 4.7req/sec, MediaWiki1.4/PHP5/Eaccelerator: 16.2req/sec, Moin 1.3 on Twisted: 34.6req/sec. Moinmoin and Twisted are python-based, with Twisted running standalone (without Apache). It's a long-running process, saving php's setup-per-request costs. The Twisted/Moin combo can be further sped up using Psyco or Pyrex- leaving MW even further behind. Too bad Moin is missing a decent theme and many MW features..
• 23 March: Added a new switch to MediaWiki that allows to get rid of the copyright check box in the upload form. Drop me a note if you'd like to do so in your wiki.
  Disabled Turck MMCache again, it still caused trouble. There are a few bug reports in the debian bug tracker, but no new version with fixes has been released.
• 22 March: Investigated the problems with Turck MMCache further. Figured out enough workarounds to enable it, even found another problem with mod_gzip and Apache/SSL. Apache/php is no fun currently. Hope no further errors turn up. MediaWiki uses MMCache to cache user interface messages (the MediaWiki namespace), sessions and pre-parsed content which increases performance significantly.
• 21 March: All wikis are running MediaWiki 1.4.0 now. Am back in Kiel after a week of travelling with bad internet access, a bit of work is ahead.
• 19 March: Accessing some php4 code sent runner's (this server) php interpreter in an endless loop which made it sluggish today. Fixed now by removing Turck MMCache, need to investigate this further on Monday. Apache was not running for about seven minutes while i was dealing with it, sorry for the inconvenience.
• 13 March: Credit cards, PayPal, site reorg, DVD update: I'm glad to announce that i'm now able to accept credit cards and (for Germans) Bankeinzug as payment methods. Recurrent payments are booked automatically, no work for you anymore. The new signup forms (using a small MediaWiki plugin i wrote for this) post straight to PayPal where the credit card and subscription details are stored. You can cancel your subscription at any time using the PayPal web form, the one-month-trial period is handled as well.
  Also shuffled some content on the site around, getting it a bit more organized.
  The DVD review has been a great success so far, i took the first dump (for the PDA edition) yesterday, final dump will happen tomorrow afternoon.
• 

  

  Cover of Wikipedia-on-CD, Autumn'04
  09 March Review, Squid3/ESI The review ist running smoothly since Thursday last week, including taking dumps from the wikimedia servers at 5am ;-) Fides performs very well, even with heavy sql query loads, no problems whatsoever.
  Had to delay a major development project aiming at MediaWiki/ESI (http://www.esi.org/) integration for the review process, but still plan to continue with it. The first step will be to expose Squid3 with epoll support to heavy loads on the wikimedia machines to see if any serious bugs show up. I've fixed a few ESI-related bugs already and would like to get more involved with Squid development. This has the potential to improve performance drastically while keeping requirements for storage/render-software moderate. Moving much more traffic and processing off the main wikimedia site is something of high priority, and the numerous hosting/server-offers and good experiences with the french squids are encouraging.
• 02 Mar fides.wikidev.net, software updates: New server called 'fides' is installed in the colo, works fine. I updated a lot of software on runner, the server this wiki is on. Currently working on the preparations for the review process of the German Wikipedia. The goal is to select the articles and images that will go on a DVD-edition similar to the earlier CD (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia-CD/Download).
• 27 Feb New server, Wikipedia review: Lots of things have happened in the last weeks. I've purchased a new server with 1Gb ram, RAID1 disk array and an Athlon XP 3200 cpu. After successful tests i'm going to install it in the colo in the next days where it will be used for the review process of the DVD-edition of the German Wikipedia.
• 02 Feb More allowed file formats: Added pdf's and djvu's to the allowed-file-list for all wikis. Let me know if your wiki needs even more relaxed rules.
• 15 Jan, 01:20 New Squid: Installed a special Squid version that contains a few patches that further improve performance. Also does the logging in the standard apache log format which allows me to use the scripts i developed for wikimedia to provide accurate statistics. Plan to get those wired up tomorrow.

News archive

MediaWiki development

I'm one of the main authors of MediaWiki, a quick list of contributions:

Squid cache integration, Apache load balancing using icp and custom squid, log analysis scripts, action=raw, action=purge, phptal skin sytem and the default Monobook skin, user styles/sitewide styles, access keys, xhtmlification of the parser, html tidy integration, __TOC__, tabbed preferences, diff selection checkbox interface, misc smaller stuff

(CVS recent changes: the cvs commit list. (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-cvs/2008-August/date.html#end))