As already mentioned at last year’s AGM, we got a new server, and we have now taken this server into operation. Thank you to Init7 for sponsoring the hosting of this server.
The new server enables us to now render OSM data worldwide.
At the annual general meeting end of March we presented our yearly activity report. Some of those activities were already reported in this blog:
Keen visitors may have noticed, we’ve re-launched our osm.ch site. Thanks to Flavio and Claudia and Michael for making the website more modern and professional looking. Comments on the new site are always welcome. Either here in the comments, as a mail to us, or by opening an issue on github or even a pull-request.
With a new logo designed by Roman, we finally came around to produce stickers. We distributed one sticker to each member with the invitation to our annual general meeting. In case you would like to get some stickers, just ask. We will gladly send you a couple of them.
There are two planned power outages:
Due to construction work in the building where the SOSM servers are located. All SOSM services are unavailable during that time:
We had a server outage from Saturday evening June 24th until Monday afternoon June 26th. The main reason was that three disks had failed in the production server and had to be replaced. Fortunately, we had enough spare disks. Sorry for any inconveniences this outage has caused. Everything should be back to normal now.
Update: the old interface is turned off. The new one is available at routing.osm.ch
There is a new routing user interface for osrm which I am testing at routingnew.osm.ch. I would welcome feedback here as a comment or on the Swiss mailing list.
There was no easy way forward. A little background: Last year, we bough some shiny new SSDs to speed up our servers.
I decided to install the new Ubuntu 16.04 onto the new disks, the new long term support version. In the mean time, most services are moved to the server with the new Ubuntu and the SSDs, except routing. I couldn’t get our old version of OSRM to run on Ubuntu 16.04, so I was forced to upgrade to the newest version. But a lot was changed in OSRM in the mean time: the API for routing requests as well as the syntax for the routing profiles. That is the main reason why we still run such an old version. The old user interface we used is no longer maintained, therefore incompatible with the current API. But there is a brand new one, which does not support multiple routing profiles. So starting at the hack weekend in Karlsruhe, I hacked the profile selector into the new interface.
The plan is now to switch to the new OSRM and user interface on Sunday, March 19th.
Our current server is a rented root server located in Germany, because comparable offers in Switzerland are a lot more expensive.
Adfinis is now hosting our new servers at their center in Bern. A big thank you to Adfinis for making it possible to run our services in Switzerland!
On Friday we drove 870 km to Haarlem in the vicinity of Amsterdam to pick up three servers. Wikimedia has decommissioned their two year old toolservers and donated the hardware to SOSM. Thanks to Wikimedia Germany and Wikimedia Switzerland for making this possible.
This will enable us to run our services on our own hardware in Switzerland. Support the move by contributing to the SOSM donation drive 2015.