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Operations/Minutes/2026-02-19

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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 19 February 2026, 19:00 London time
Location: Video room at https://osmvideo.cloud68.co

Participants

Absent

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi, including some notes from Grant.

New action items from this meeting

Grant to email the State of the Map organising committee (SotM WG) regarding the participation of Equinix at the State of the Map 2026 conference, possibly cc'ing Héctor Ochoa Ortz (board). [Topic: Equinix at SotM 2026]

Reportage

Cease and Desist to Bright Data

Background: Grant sent to Bright Data a Cease and Desist letter a few weeks ago, because we have observed sustained, high-volume automated access to OpenStreetMap services consistent with large-scale scraping/crawling behaviour, including the use of rotating proxy IP addresses commonly associated with "residential" proxy networks. He has also notified other companies as well.

Grant just replied to Bright Data's email, after getting feedback from the Licensing Working Group (LWG).

PostGIS

Summary:
Enabling PostGIS is a blocker for moderation zones – would appreciate some clarification.

There are issues with the migration and enabling the postgis extension, the migrations for osm.org do not have sufficient permissions to enable extensions. We still need to resolve the workaround method for enabling postgis / migrations.

While we are able to come up technical solution for migrating onosm.org users, this may impact developers or 3rd party users of our codebase.

Main concern: We would be adding a new requirement on everybody running the code/the migrations.

Suggestions

  • Get Chef to enable Postgres - suggested by Andy.
  • Create a new user, that is a super user, and used to only run migrations. This would require more work for the dev site, as there is nothing to manage table permissions.

On the suggestion to make the feature optional, and make sure it works well without Postgis
Hard to do - unless we delete PostGIS from the migrations, we can't run them. However, even if we removed it, there would be tables that it wouldn't be able to create because it wouldn't be able to create the indexes.

Other points mentioned during discussion
Pablo Brasero Moreno (OSM core software engineer) got it working in the Docker-based environment, which runs most stuff as Postgres user/superuser.

Possible, but need to figure out a way.

Fastly progress for OpenStreetMap.org

  • There are additional blocks we need to add.
  • We might split API and www switch.
  • We need to build up fingerprint data.

On blocking: Grant has to create additional tables managed by OpenTofu for blocking, once an abusive pattern has been identified. These tables are populated by the CLI tool. However, all data table types are limited to a thousand entries, which could be problematic.

Links shared

On GPT requests

  • What seem to be ChatGPT bots are making around a quarter of a million requests per machine per day.
  • Most of the requests have been blocked.
  • Some of the requests are coming through a Cloudflare worker frontend that proxies to the website.

Need enough fingerprints, for blocking.

Suggestions

  • Block the GPT bot associated Cloudflare IPs.
  • Put a per IP rate limiter, while we temporarily switch for a few minutes, to try and gather enough fingerprints.
  • Look at fingerprints from Nominatim, to help the blocking.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • If you hit API and the request is not slash API, then you get redirected to www.

Any other business

Credativ consultancy on OSM.org Postgres database update

Minh emailed the people at Credativ, rewording Paul's email.

Equinix at State of the Map 2026

Equinix, which provides free hosting to us, will send a staff member at SotM 2026 and asked for:

  • a data center tour,
  • a promotion/mention at the conference, as an organisation that supports OSM.

Action item

Grant to email the State of the Map organising committee (SotM WG) regarding the participation of Equinix at the State of the Map 2026 conference, possibly cc'ing Héctor Ochoa Ortz (board).

Action items

  • 2026-01-22 Grant to get AWS S3 bucket credentials for the dev server. [Topic: Credativ consultancy on OSM.org Postgres database update]
  • 2026-01-22 Tom to follow up question on pgbackrest local backup required or can /JUST/ S3 be used. [Topic: Credativ consultancy on OSM.org Postgres database update]
  • 2026-01-22 OPS to work on follow-up questions for the database consultant and then respond when ready. [Topic: Credativ consultancy on OSM.org Postgres database update]
  • 2026-01-22 OPS to review again at next OWG call. [Topic: Credativ consultancy on OSM.org Postgres database update]
  • 2026-01-22 Grant to create a ticket about Outlook.com rate limiting the osm.org mail server. [Topic: Outlook.com rate limiting osm.org mail server]
  • 2025-11-27 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]
  • 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]
  • 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]
  • 2025-10-16 Grant to create a PR about adding logic to Chef for retrying failed initial creation of Let's Encrypt certificates [Topic: Add logic to Chef for retrying failed initial creation of Let's Encrypt certificates]
  • 2025-10-02 Grant to discuss with Paul Norman and flesh out his suggestion and determine the practicalities (e.g. key revocation). [Topic: AWS CA cert]
  • 2025-10-02 Grant to follow up with Paul. [Topic: Serving vector tile styles]
  • 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)]
  • 2025-09-18 Paul to look at potential issues related to the collation of indexes - Debian Postgres upgrade. [Topic: OSM DB upgrade to Postgres 17]
  • 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.

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

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