kohl.wikimedia.org
kohl.wikimedia.org was a web server hosting miscellaneous tools in a production environment. It existed from 2004 to 2006, and played a role in inspiring the creation of WMDE Toolserver, noc.wikimedia.org, and techblog.wikimedia.org.[citation needed]
Kate's Tools
In 2004, the WMDE Toolserver did not yet exist. The technical community mainly hosted their tools on independently hosted servers, using only public APIs and data dumps.
Kohl comprised only a single server, but had the unique privilege of direct and unrestricted internal network access to production MediaWiki databases. This enabled a kind of tool that, at the time, could not have worked through web APIs alone.
The following tools were included, as developed by Kate (also known by username river):
- Kate's Six Degrees of Wikipedia.
- User edit counter.
For future greppers: These tools stored some misc data in a database called katesdb, using tables such as sixdeg_recent, in a db section now known as s3.
MediaWiki weblog
In November 2004, the then-called "MediaWiki weblog" was launched on the same server, and mainly posted to by Hashar (then under alias "Ashar Voultoiz"). The blog was powered using the Pivot, a PHP-based CMS software. See archive of MediaWiki weblog at kohl.wikimedia.org/blog/.
The weblog was later replaced by a Livejournal at https://wikitech.livejournal.com/, and likely inspired Techblog.wikimedia.org a few years after that.
Network operation center
The landing page of Kohl initially linked primarily to Kate's Tools and the MediaWiki weblog. It was grew to also serve as entry point for various production monitoring tools, including:
- Ganglia graphs for production, then-known as the "Wikimedia Grid". This would in later years be replaced by Icinga, Graphite, Prometheus, and Grafana.
- Network traffic rate stats.
- Squid CDN service health metrics.
After the weblog and tools were relocated elsewhere, the remaining landing page was renamed to noc.wikimedia.org.
Nagios
First installed in Jan 2005 by Hashar.[1]
See also
- Developer activity (2005-2008).
- database (9 Dec 2005) a toolserver-l announcement by Kate about database replicas.
- Kate's-Tools, Bugzilla category (now Phabricator).
External links
- ↑ [Wikitech-l] nagios monitoring alpha, 9 Jan 2005.