Operations/Minutes/2025-07-24
OpenStreetMap Foundation, Operations Meeting - Draft minutes
These minutes do not go through a formal acceptance process.
This is not strictly an Operations Working Group (OWG) meeting.
Thursday 24 July 2025, 19:00 London time
Location: Video room at https://osmvideo.cloud68.co
Participants
- Tom Hughes (Operations Working Group volunteer)
- Grant Slater (Senior Site Reliability Engineer, OWG)
- Minh Nguyễn (OSM core software development facilitator)
Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi, including some notes from Grant.
New action items from this meeting
- Grant to set-up a test for OWG's review [Topic: Switching www.osm.org to Fastly frontend]
- Grant to do the Mailman 2 to 3 conversion [Topic: Mailing lists]
- Grant to investigate getting a developer account via OSMF Business account [Topic: Apple Login]
Reportage
New Vector Tile layers on osm.org
Related to blog post [https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2025/07/22/vector-tiles-are-deployed-on-openstreetmap-org/ Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org]
- People seem to focus more on MapTiler rather than on Shortbread, as it is a more complete product.
- The people on the US Slack channel get the difference between the two new featured layers added to osm.org.
On updates
- MapTiler: people are expecting minutely updates, while updates are probably every 2-3 weeks, as they do for their customers.
- Shortbread: updates every ~2 minutes, with caching. Browser refreshes, force refreshes.
Other points mentioned during discussion
- It is unknown whether MapTiler has a CDN in front of it.
HE.net cost
Related to action item: 2025-03-20 Grant to negotiate with HE.net if we can get better cost from them as a fallback link (which he had proposed), to allow budget spend elsewhere. [Topic: HE.net]
- Cost: Currently paying He.net USD 18,000 per year.
- Use: We're still pushing some data through Dublin. It seems that someone hardcoded the HE.net addresses.
- Set-up: Dual links which give us router redundancy.
We asked He.net for a price reduction and they give us a USD 5,000 discount if we sign-up for a one-year contract. Grant has emailed the Treasurer, but has not heard back. We could drop one of the links, but we would lose redundancy.
Decision: Wait for the Treasurer's answer and then discuss it on IRC.
Fastly
Grant and Minh had a call with Fastly's marketing department. They want to do a case study about OSM and our use of their service. They seemed to want to assess whether we sound reasonable, in order to promote us.
The call was recorded, transcribed and will be reviewed by their marketing team. If everything is ok, we will do a second call, which will get recorded and published, together with an article.
They are happy for us to do more with Fastly. Grant mentioned that we may want to move the osm.org website to Fastly.
Switching www.osm.org to Fastly frontend
- Fastly Distribution - Grant to create it in OpenTofu.
- Certificates? - Grant to check. We could use DNS or WebAuth.
- Fastly DDOS protection service (SHIELD) enable?
- Fastly AI protection enable?
- Fastly AI protection for wiki?
- Add some smart logic for assists (deploy) add later? Alternative would be hash based directory (stick backend)
Other points mentioned during discussion
- Fastly DSL is very flexible - you can make it restart a backend query based on any criteria.
- Fastly supports different hashing algorithms for backend selection.
- Fastky is less of an issue for those of our users that dislike Cloudflare. Cloudflare had bad peering with Deutsche Telekom.
Action item: Grant to set-up a test for OWG's review.
OS upgrades
- Debian 13 prep.
- Ubuntu 20.04 machines need upgrades.
Mailing lists
We'll have to do a Mailman 3 upgrade, as we won't get rid of all the mailing lists.
Action item: Grant to do the Mailman 2 to 3 conversion.
Mailman 2
- We can't do a Mailman 2 container, as the distro that the container uses is no longer supported.
- Theoretically, Mailman 2 is on long-term maintenance support for major security features.
On HyperKitty
- Mailing list archiver.
- Used by Fedora and Wikimedia.
- Debian package: python3-django-hyperkitty.
Other points mentioned during discussion
- Debian 13 seems to have all Mailman 3 packages, including Postorius (web front-end for managing list memberships) and HyperKitty.
- HyperKitty is just one of the backend archiving options.
- We might have to do some redirects.
- We have daily back-ups of the mailing lists.
Apple support
Client ID is needed.
OSMF has a business account with Apple, where Grant and Guillaume Rischard (board member) are the only members.
Action item: Grant to investigate getting a developer account via OSMF Business account.
30 August - Grant to give an introductory talk about OWG
Grant was encourgaged to find more people to help the OWG. An online introductory talk about OWG was proposed.
Potential date: 30 August.
Action items reviewed at the beginning of the meeting
2025-07-10 Tom to review the security announcement draft. [Topic: Security announcement]2025-07-10 Minh to publish the security announcement today. [Topic: Security announcement]- 2025-06-12 Tom to look into plausibility of OSM.org Postgres upgrade: Tom will do a dry-run on a disconnected promoted slave to test upgrade. Secondary will need to be re-synced after the upgrade. Need to confirm the downstream affect on (planet-dump-ng). [Topic: OSM.org Postgres database]
- 2025-06-12 OPS to plan a maintenance window for the OSM.org Postgres database update. [Topic: OSM.org Postgres database]
- 2025-05-01 Grant to follow-up with Australian hosting again. [Topic: OSUOSL funding / issues]
- 2025-05-01 Grant to see if other University offers are still available and what hardware would be required. [Topic: OSUOSL funding / issues
2025-03-20 Grant to negotiate with HE.net if we can get better cost from them as a fallback link (which he had proposed), to allow budget spend elsewhere. [Topic: HE.net]- 2025-03-20 Grant to run an SQL query to identify more email providers used by spammers. [Topic: Spam]
- 2025-03-06 Grant to present a draft budget at the next meeting.
- 2024-09-19 Grant to create an IP blocklist script. [Topic: Cloudflare keep enabled Reportage] - Discussion during 2024-07-25 OPS to make a reasonable evaluation whether to go with Cloudflare, Fastly or none.
Action items that have been stricken-through are completed, removed, or have been moved to GitHub tickets.