New donation drive
A new donation drive was launched, work in support of which included moving the donation server to new hardware and making it Chef-y. Please support OpenStreetMap. Tweet.
Carto stylesheet v2.43.0 and v2.44.0 deployed
Upgrade Recaptcha on wiki
The wiki sign-up had been using an old version of Google’s recaptcha which required sign-ups to help Google digitise house numbers. A more recent version is now being used which does that less often. An alternative solution seems preferable, but all the alternatives which were investigated were not suitable for visually-impaired users. Issue.
Continuing upgrades to 16.04
The heroic epic of upgrading machines to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS continues. Issue
New tile cache
A new tile cache in Denmark, called odin, was generously donated by dotsrc.org.
Attempts to fix zero-size files problems
When the planet file server, called ironbelly, crashes (as all computers occasionally do) it can sometimes leave zero-size replication files on disk. These replication files are useless and, if the wrong file is corrupted, can even prevent replication from continuing when the server reboots.
Several attempts were made to fix this by various invocations of fsync system calls. Getting data committed and durable on disk is known to be tricky.
Upgrade high zoom array on render server
The “high zoom” array, containing tiles at zooms 17 and up, was replaced in one of the rendering servers, orm. This will reduce the latency of fetching a tile from disk, and also replaces a failing disk. Issue.