Wikimedia Quarto/3/tech

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State of the article : Editing - Proofreading - Translating

Release of MediaWiki 1.4
MediaWiki 1.4 reached stable status 20th March. Although the WikiMedia farm ran 1.4 betas since December 2004, it also mean that most bugs have been fixed and developers can now work full time on the next release. The new version will come out with a new database schema which should dramatically enhance performances. There is also some interesting code to improve page caching : pages served to anonymous users and to logged in users will look the same which is not the case with 1.4.

Power outages
We had two major outages. The first one around 21st February was due to a double power failure, our two power supply got switched off at the same time. Developers had to recover the lost data, site has been put back in read only as fast as possible and write resumed once the database integrity has been full filed. The second outage on 16th March is an human error, one of the master database hard disk filled all disk space and slaves were no more updated. Databases had to be synced.

Our server farm
Still on server side, about 10 broken servers have been fixed. The fault was due to CMOS batteries. Most of the servers are now back in activity and the cluster is actually healthy.

Blocking of open proxies
... to be filled (explain the spam issue)

Communication with the community
Developers opened a blog on LiveJournal as a way to communicate about servers issues with the community. One more feed for your preferred RSS aggregator :http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/ .