Nominatim Slave

Both nominatim servers are now in production use, with poldi as a slave server and pummelzacken as the master using postgres replication to keep both in sync.

SOTM-US talks

Grant Slater presented a talk on “Running OpenStreetMap.org” at State of the Map US, which is a great overview of many of the activities of the Operations Working Group and sysadmins. Tom Hughes also gave a talk on the related subject of Building OpenStreetMap.org which would be of interest to anyone wanting to get involved in “the OSM code”. There are videos available of both talks, which are highly recommended viewing.

Donation drive

Coinciding with State of the Map US, OWG launched a donation drive in partnership with Mapzen and Mapbox to raise money for new and replacement hardware to keep OSM growing over the next year. The donation drive was very succesful and has now closed, but donations are still very welcome at the donation site.

Rate-limiting discussion

Due to the heavy load that some API calls can produce, it is necessary to rate-limit them to ensure that other, lighter users of the API do not suffer. Unfortunately, the implementation of this is currently based on client IP address, which does not have the intended effect on mapping parties or HOT events occurring behind NATted IPs. This was reported and discussed, and needs work from interested parties to either develop the necessary code or gather sufficient data to make an informed decision about what a reasonable new limit would be.

Renew pingdom

The subscription to Pingdom, a monitoring/uptime service, was renewed.

Better outage reporting for nominatim

Previously, checks were testing a no-op on the API, which didn’t check if the database was actually working and could provide false negatives under some circumstances. This has been fixed.

Changeset dump issue with missing comments

There was an issue with changeset dumps missing comments, which turned out to be a scripting error and was fixed. Changeset dumps should now have a complete record of comments.