Operations/Minutes/2025-08-21

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

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 21 August 2025, 19:00 London time
Location: Video room at https://osmvideo.cloud68.co

Participants

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi, including some notes from Grant.

New action items from this meeting

  • 2025-08-21 Grant to create a draft with an academic justification on why the Australian academic institution would benefit from hosting an Australian tile server. [Reportage: Potential Australian tile server]
  • 2025-08-21 Minh Nguyễn to look at Grant's draft, when ready. [Reportage: Potential Australian tile server]
  • 2025-08-21 Grant to check with Gregory Marler if the SotM Europe 2025 venue would allow some space for an OPS meeting. After Gregory's reply, will follow up on IRC. [Topic: SotM Europe 2025 OPS meeting]

Reportage

Potential Taiwanese server(s)

Related to action item: 2025-08-07 Grant to nudge the Taiwanese contacts for a server there, let them know that we don't need more than 10 Gbit cards and to propose the server to be used initially as a raster server. [Topic: .tw server]

The Taiwanese people who are offering us a server, are now potentially offering a second server. They will come back to use, once they sort the hardware. While we told them that 10 Gbit is more than fine, they said we will get 100 Gbit, as all their switches are 100 Gbit. That will be the fastest connection we ever had.

Potential Australian tile server

Related to action item: 2025-05-01 Grant to follow-up with Australian hosting again. [Topic: OSUOSL funding / issues]

The Australian academic institution needs help from us to provide an academic justification why they would benefit from hosting an Australian tile server.

Action items:

  • Grant to create a draft with an academic justification on why the Australian academic institution would benefit from hosting an Australian tile server.
  • Minh to look at Grant's draft when ready.

Draft budget

Related to action item: 2025-03-06 Grant to present a draft budget at the next meeting.

The OPS draft budget was approved by the board.

Creation of an IP blocklist script

Related to action item: 2024-09-19 Grant to create an IP blocklist script. [Topic: Cloudflare keep enabled?][2024-09-19 Reportage] - Discussion during 2024-07-25 OPS to make a reasonable evaluation whether to go with Cloudflare, Fastly or none. - Grant to create now

As we will move from Cloudflare to Fastly, this is low priority.

Spam

Related to action item: 2025-03-20 Grant to run an SQL query to identify more email providers used by spammers. [Topic: Spam] #2025-05-01 Grant has created a small list now disposable email providers.

  • Sample pack to be published, so that people can help us with spam flagging.
  • Tom and Grant have been doing multiple clean-ups.

OPS meeting at SotM Europe 2025

OPS needs to figure out the meeting date, to finalise their travel plans. The main conference will take place on Friday and Saturday.

Suggestions

  • Have the OPS meeting on Sunday. Alternative option: Thursday.
  • Could be an OPS+website developers meeting.
    • Andy Allan might attend the conference.

Action item: Grant to check with Gregory Marler if the SotM Europe 2025 venue would allow some space for an OPS meeting. After Gregory's reply, will follow up on IRC.

Upgrades

Ridley (Site gateway, Foundation related sites) upgrade is blocked, because of the risk with CiviCRM, which has OSMF's membership database. The OSMF wikis still need to be upgraded, but blocked by PHP.

On CiviCRM

  • Issues:
    • Software is a black box, to a degree.
    • Software is fragile. The payment gateway was set up by a board member, instead of using the built-in PayPal express, which might have helped to avoid the issue with the failing automatic membership renewals via PayPal.
  • There have been discussions of potentially hiring a CiviCRM contractor.
  • Michael Spreng (Membership Working Group (MWG) volunteer) had mentioned that we had 2 CiviCRM contacts previously.
    • One turned unresponsive.
    • The second contact was with a CiviCRM support organisations, via Michelle Heydon (OSMF accountant). They agreed to help us if we have tech questions but we have to define the questions first.
  • Grant is working on building a CiviCRM test instance.

Alerting / Monitoring

  • Statuscake didn't trigger during the Nominatim outage during the HE.net maintenance. We need to check why it didn't trigger.
    • We likely need to add checks if switches are reachable (HE.net / Equinix Internet). We could also add smoke ping tests to HE.net / Equinix
  • Improving silencing? Might need additional tags, but painful to achieve. Grant to looking into tags for maintenance. Smokeping is particularly bad with up/down flapping.
  • Mail server has specific alter, goes to Tom and Grant. Grant will check this later.
  • Mailman: Grant to set max moderator hold to 60 days for all lists.
  • Pending is still full setup of Pagerduty.

Action items

  • DONE 2025-08-07 Grant to nudge the Taiwanese contacts for a server there, let them know that we don't need more than 10 Gbit cards and to propose the server to be used initially as a raster server. [Topic: .tw server]
  • 2025-08-07 Grant to 1) create AWS account + S3 buckets, 2) start from what we log for raster tiles, and 3) set the logging compression to zstd. [Topic: Vector Tile Logging]
  • DONE 2025-08-07 Grant to nudge about the .tw server and mention that 10Gbps is more than enough. [Topic: .tw server]
  • 2025-07-24 Grant to set-up a test for OWG's review [Topic: Switching www.osm.org to Fastly frontend]
  • 2025-07-24 Grant to do the Mailman 2 to 3 conversion [Topic: Mailing lists] - https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/1264
  • 2025-06-12 Tom still to run OSMDBT test. OPS then to plan a maintenance window for the OSM.org postgres database update. [Topic: OSM.org postgres database]
  • 2025-05-01 Progress, we need to form academic justification and then we should get something: 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 follow-up with the South African contact about the potential hardware donation from a mobile network. [Topic: New offers of Servers Australia and South Africa]
  • 2025-03-20 Grant to run an SQL query to identify more email providers used by spammers. [Topic: Spam] #2025-05-01 Grant has created a small list of disposable email providers.
  • 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.

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