Operations/Minutes/2025-09-18

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 18 September 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

  • Grant to test the BIOS upgrade against snap-02. Whenever suitable. [Topic: OSM DB upgrade to Postgres 17]
  • Grant to send an announcement about the upgrade tomorrow. [Topic: OSM DB upgrade to Postgres 17]
  • Paul to look at potential issues related to the collation of indexes - Debian Postgres upgrade. [Topic: OSM DB upgrade to Postgres 17]
  • Grant to get Gen10 quotes for Nominatim upgrade. [Topic: Hardware upgrade - Nominatim]
  • Grant to ask Sarah if she will be happy with a Gen10. [Topic: Hardware upgrade - Nominatim]

Reportage

Potential Australian OSM tile server

Related to action item 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]

Grant provided a draft with justification of why Geoscience Australia (Australia's governmental mapping agency) would benefit from hosting an Australian OSM tile server. The topic was handed over to Dani Waltersdorfer (board) and Minh (OSM core software facilitator).

SotM Europe 2025 OPS meeting

Related to action item 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]

Done.

A group will probably host the in-person OPS meeting on Sunday, after SotM Europe 2025.

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

To be removed, as we will use Fastly.

USA University offers

Related to action item 2025-05-01 Grant to see if other USA University offers are still available and what hardware would be required. [Topic: OSUOSL funding / issues]

Parked.

At the beginning of 2025 there was a soft-offer by OSM US regarding providing OPS with hardware hosted in (probably) Texas. OPS had noted that the had some high requirements and the available University hardware was DELL.

  • Minh has some US University contacts if we need US hosting.
  • In the past, it has been difficult to get hosting in the US.
  • Academic institutions do not care about bandwidth, which is helpful.

OSM DB upgrade to Postgres 17

Upgrade window: Sunday 5th October: 10:00 to 13:00.

  • No Debian upgrade at this time.
  • Order: Site offline, BIOS, Postgres upgrade.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • The two Snap servers are exact clones.

Action items

  • Grant to test the BIOS upgrade against snap-02. Whenever suitable.
  • Grant to send an announcement about the upgrade tomorrow.
  • Paul to look at potential issues related to the collation of indexes - Debian Postgres upgrade.

AWS Security

Decision: topic will not be minuted. Two (not public) action items.

Upcoming Ops talks

Introductory talk

Grant to give an introductory talk on the 27th of September. To present the OPS tasks, what OPS look after and how to run a Chef test locally.

Aims

  • Get people interested.
  • Give guidance on running a Chef test locally.

Suggestions

  • Create an event on OSMcal, so people can indicate that they plan to attend.

Post-meeting note: https://osmcal.org/event/4070/

On recording the talk
People have asked whether Grant will record the talk. He will probably record it, but not release it immediately, as it probably overlaps with his SotM Europe 2025 talk (See below).

SotM Europe 2025 talks

Hardware upgrade - Nominatim

Sarah has been struggling with the US Nominatim server.

  • Budget for (second hand) server: GBP 5000.
  • Prefer HPE over Supermicro, as we have standardised on HPE.

On hardware options

  • HPE.
    • Difficult to find (second hand) HPE hardware in the US.
  • Supermicro.
    • The most recent (second hand) Supermicro for Nominatim we got is in London, and we could try to find something similar in the US.
    • We would have to order the components separately from the supplier.
    • About the same price as Gen10, but would be faster.

On shipping from Europe to the US

  • Shipping from Europe will probably be prohibitively expensive.
  • At this time, there are issues sending items from Europe to the US.
  • Last time, the delivery got delayed by a week.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • Gen10+ are rare.
  • Gen11 (used ones) are more expensive by at least GBP 3,000.
  • Getting a base spec machine and asking OSU students to customise it was ruled out.

Action items

  • Grant to get Gen10 quotes for Nominatim upgrade.
  • Grant to ask Sarah if she will be happy with a Gen10.

Any other business

New Core Software Engineer

Pablo Brasero Moreno (https://github.com/pablobm) has just been contracted by OSMF as a Core Software Engineer (call for applications post).

  • Experienced in Rails and Open-Source development.
  • Currently onboarding.

OSU migration and nominal cost for hosting

There is a migration coming up at Oregon State University (OSU) and OSMF has to sign-up for the hosting, which comes with a nominal cost. The migration seems to move fairly quickly.

Action items

  • DONE: 2025-08-21Grant 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]
  • DONE: 2025-08-21Minh to look at Grant's draft when ready. [Reportage: Potential Australian tile server]
  • DONE: 2025-08-21Grant 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]
  • 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]
  • 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
  • DONE first part, see the agenda: 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.
  • To be removed, see "reportage" 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. #2025-09-18 To be removed, as we will use Fastly.

Action items that have been stricken-through are completed, removed, or have been moved to GitHub tickets.

Retrieved from "https://osmfoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Operations/Minutes/2025-09-18&oldid=13998"