[57north-discuss] New Semantic MediaWiki for 57North

[Iain R. Learmonth]

Hi Rob,

On Thu, Jan 08, 2015 at 01:02:05AM +0000, Robert McWilliam wrote:
> To bring folks who weren't paying attention to IRC when we discussed
> this up to speed: this is currently hosted on hackr which is Iain's
> dedicated server. 

Indeed, although the management account to which this is linked at OVH has
only this server on it.

> I'm not comfortable with space infrastructure being hosting on
> machines under the sole control of one member. I think it should be
> hosted somewhere under the control of the space generally to protect
> against it disappearing if the member doesn't want to host it anymore
> or becomes unavailable. I'm especially uncomfortable if we're going to
> be using this as the main public facing site for the space. 

If it is to be moved, it should be moved for a good reason, not a bad
reason. That is, it should be moved because we have a machine that is under
space control but *also* has the specs to run it.

In the future I have plans of integrating other space services into the
wiki, like Redmine, through the RDF backend. This doesn't necessitate these
applications running on the same machine however.

> From the discussion on IRC it looks like the new wiki requires more
> resources to run than are available on the current space VPS. 

Yes, RDF is known to not be very resource friendly.

> Iain, could you tell us what spec is needed? 

With the current number of pages on the wiki, 192MB of RAM is required to
hold the full triplestore. This will grow as the wiki does, but I do not see
it using more than 2GB for at least a year. Obviously, allow extra RAM for
the OS and stuff. I would recommend at least 2 cores being available for the
wiki if you want it to be as responsive as it currently is.

> Is it possible to have a lower spec machine doing the web serving and
> separate that from the heavy lifting, or is the heavy lifting in the
> serving up pages part of things? 

Theoretically they are seperate tasks, although I would have no idea how to
seperate them and that would probably be more hassle than it is worth.

As far as I know the space currently has no procedures for securely managing
credentials. Our Bitfolk VPS is registered to me, although others have root
SSH access. HackHub still runs on a VPS that is owned by a non-member and
we're not even sure what country he's in and we rely on him to continue
paying for that on a monthly basis. I also don't believe that the space can
afford to pay £36/month (I looked it up now) for the rental of hackr and
there will be more services appearing over the next year.

Thanks,
Iain.

-- 
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