Operations/Minutes/2025-11-27

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

Participants

Tom Hughes (OWG volunteer)
Grant Slater (OWG, OSMF Senior Site Reliability Engineer)
Paul Norman (OWG volunteer, OSMF contractor)
Minh Nguyễn (OSMF core software development facilitator)
Héctor Ochoa Ortiz (OSMF Board)
Alex (guest)

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.

New action items from this meeting

Paul to notify the board that without their response to the OWG budget questions before mid-December the OWG can't provide their 2026 budget before the end of the year. [Topic: On OWG 2026 budget]
Grant to get back to all of the persons interested to help with new OSM Spyglass service by next Wednesday. [Topic: SotM Europe 2025 follow up - Looking for sysadmin help with new OSM Spyglass service]

Alex - self-introduction

Alex (guest) is an occasional contributor to OSM and has set up a Panoramax instance for Wales.

Panoramax Wales' server on: Hertzner Cloud
S3 provider: Backblaze

Might move from Backblaze to Mega, as when it does the blurring and makes the derivatives, they both count as downloads. Mega has more favourable download allowances.

Comment: API access seems the constraint, rather than speed. Otherwise, it might have made sense to add a proxy in front of any S3 providers, as there are performance gains.

Alex was interested to see how the more professional management of servers happened.

Reportage

On looking for sysadmin help with new OSM Spyglass service

See: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/looking-for-sysadmin-help-with-new-openstreetmap-spyglass-service/138487

The OWG will help the person get on board.
There are several volunteers.

On hardware prices

64GB DDR5 cost is approximately GBP 1,000.
RAM and hard drive prices have increased a lot.
Some refurbished disks might be reasonably priced, but their prices are not dropping.

On the OWG 2026 budget

> Question from Paul to Grant whether the OSMF board has been responding to emails, as he did not receive a reply to his emails about the OWG 2026 budget.

Comments from Héctor (OSMF board):

Roland Olbricht (Treasurer) has been busy.
The board will discuss Paul's email during one of their next meetings, in two weeks (closed board chat) or three weeks (public board meeting).

Action item: Paul to notify the board that if they don't provide a response to the OWG budget questions before mid-December, the OWG will not be able to provide their 2026 budget before the end of the year.

Concern expressed by Grant on creating a budget while the RAM prices are wildly changing.
- Most of the OWG budget is not going to be capital.

AWS Identity and Access Management Roles Anywhere

Related to action item: 2025-10-16 Grant and Paul to set up a meeting about AWS Identity and Access Management Roles Anywhere https://docs.aws.amazon.com/rolesanywhere/latest/userguide/introduction.html. [Topic: AWS CA cert]

There was a discussion (prior to this meeting), but the next steps were not defined.
Grant would like to speak to someone about AWS security, but hasn't found anyone yet. He had posted messages on Mastodon, proposing to discuss AWS security during the State of the Map Europe 2025 conference. This added constraints to who would reply.

Action item: Grant to post another message on Mastodon and potentially on community.osm.org about discussing AWS security. He is most interested in Roles.

Test Kitchen related refactoring

Related to action item: 2025-10-16 Grant to create a PR regarding refactoring some stuff. [Topic: Reworking of Test Kitchen methods for defining which jobs run on Test Kitchen Github actions]

In PR.

Nominatim: purchase of second-hand server

Related to action item: 2025-10-02 Grant to go ahead with the purchase of the Gen10 (second-hand) server for Nominatim in the US. [Topic: Gen10 Nominatim purchase (USA)]

Request sent to the provider just before this meeting, to find out the approximate price. There is an invoice for Treasurer to pay, which might arrive tomorrow. The server's purchase is within OWG's budget.

Fastly frontend

Related to action item: 2025-07-24 Grant to set up a test for OWG's review [Topic: Switching www.osm.org to Fastly frontend]

Grant wants to try faking the IP address header we send to the Fastly frontend, to be in the same format as the one that Cloudflare currently sends.

Suggestion: Change the Apache configuration to recognise the Fastly header, rather than the Cloudflare one.

Grant tried to get every domain currently supported for Nominatim to be supported on Fastly and two domains give errors (see below). These domains have not been put on the config of the main site yet. Grant is waiting for a reply from Fastly.

"Error: Domain 'openstreetmap.com' is already taken by another customer"
"Error: Domain 'openstreetmaps.org' is already taken by another customer"

Mailman 2 to 3 conversion

Related to action item: 2025-07-24 Grant to do the Mailman 2 to 3 conversion [Topic: Mailing lists] - https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/1264

In a ticket. Action item to be removed.

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] #2025-09-18 parked.

Action item to be removed.

Potential South African hardware donation

Related to action item: 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] #2025-09-18 parked.

Low priority on the South African contact's to-do list and our to-do list. Grant needs to keep the communication. Action item will be removed from this list.

Identifying more email providers used by spammers

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. #2025-09-18 parked.

Grant has an SQL query which is reasonable good at finding the actual spammers from OSM deleted accounts.

Wiki capacity planning

Server: Konqi

Links shared:

CPU pressure: 0.09 %
Memory pressure: 0
I/O pressure: 0.0002

The machine is not at capacity.

Suggestions

Put Varnish or Fastly in front of the wiki, to improve performance of some pages, such as Map Features (which has many nested templates), or other pages with massive templated logic.
- Varnish makes it faster for logged-out users - for logged-in users, it's uncached.

Space

Growth looks mostly flat, with some bumps, probably due to failures of backup script (there's a ticket for it).
Space is probably not a constraint.

No capacity issues for the next ~ 3 years. Any issues will be due to feature changes, rather than growth.

Map features

Issues with the Map Features page

Wiki Commons images: The main issue causing the page to not load was the linked images from Wiki Commons, as we get rate-limited by Wiki Commons.The PHP worker would hang, while waiting for Wiki Commons to respond, and would hit time-out. Whenever the cache was clear (a common occurrence), it would wait idling for the Wiki Commons to never respond.
Caching: We create a dump of the wiki - it would go through every item of the site, including the history, and would create cache entries for those. This would cause the cache to expire. Grant changed the cache purging from daily to weekly.
- The language bar might be interfering with the caching, as it is using a hack to localise itself.

Currently, the Map Features page performance is reasonable, unless you hit it when a cache purge happens on a Sunday.

Suggestions

Make the Map Features page shorter.
Reach out to people at Wikimedia, to fix the limits on our account.

Other points mentioned during discussion

Minh is talking with Mateusz Konieczny, who is interested in creating a website for dedicated iD editor tagging schema, which might take some pressure off the Map Features page.

Héctor had to leave 28 minutes after start.

State of the Map Europe 2025 follow up

The subtopics below are related to discussions during the State of the Map Europe 2025 conference. (14-15 November 2025, Dundee, Scotland)

Looking for sysadmin help with new OSM Spyglass service

Related to 2025-11-24 post on community.osm.org: Looking for sysadmin help with new OpenStreetMap Spyglass service

6-8 interested people. Some junior but eager, some senior in the OSM space.

Suggestion

Grant to create an outline of what is required and end goals.

Plan

Grant to get back to all the interested persons by next Wednesday.
Select two people and suggest to them to work together for Spyglass. Suggest other tasks for the rest of the people - Grant to offer mentoring for PRs.

Other points mentioned during discussion

Desperately need more people, but we can't handle 8 doing one task.
Working on Mailman 2 to 3 conversion was rejected as a potential task, as it contains private data.

Selection

Paul and Grant to select the people. Tom and Minh are also welcome to get involved.

Action item: Grant to get back to all the persons interested to help with new OSM Spyglass service by next Wednesday.

PostgreSQL consultant

During SotM Europe 2025, Jochen Topf asked Grant if the OWG had any questions for the PostgreSQL consultant. Grant lacked the background, as he had not been included in the related email discussion, however he came up with a list of questions which he will share with the OPS for review, before sending them to the consultant (it's limited hours of consultancy time).

Any other business

Tom and Pablo Brasero are working on spam

Tom and Pablo Brasero are working on spam.

Other points mentioned during discussion

Pablo also talked with Data Working Group (DWG) members, who have some ideas for things he could work on. Minh to work with Pablo, to make sure the discussions stay on track.

MapLibre discussion

Grant wants to change some websites with his imagery (e.g. https://aerial.openstreetmap.org.za/) from using Leaflet to MapLibre. He wants to show the sheets that make up these sites, as an overlay.

Hard part is computing the sheet boundaries.
- Tom is already doing it for his site.

MapLibre in the OSM Wiki

Suggestions

Convert to MapLibre for maps served by the OSM wiki.
- There is currently a separate template for MapLibre, for compatibility reasons, on the OSM wiki. We'll gradually move things over.
The issue of fully resolved urls in the style must be fixed.

Other points mentioned during discussion

It would help to have a shortbread style to point at, without worrying about relative URLs.
Would we allow anyone to point at the style, or restrict it to osm.org sites?
- Suggestion: Start from a restrictive core, add contact information, and then expand.

Vector changes to Fastly config

Grant did some small Vector-related changes to the Fastly config.

Action items

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

Meeting ended 52 minutes after start.