With the growth of the Foundation has come numerous necessary upgrades from Office IT, in order to support more users. One of the most noticeable (and more appreciated by the staff) is upgrading the internet connection. Some groups can get away with bare minimum internet connectivity, but we simply cannot since most everyone needs a decent Internet connection for their work (imagine how hard it would be for the Ops engineers to work, if they couldn’t SSH). When I started this summer, the San Francisco office had three bonded T1′s, for a total of 4.5 megabits/second of bandwidth. Recently, we completed an upgrade to a 100 megabit fiber connection along with a replacement firewall, the Cisco ASA 5510.
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In the Wikimedia Foundation, we’ve got two technical groups: the Operations/Development crew (the group you are used to hearing from on this blog) and ourselves in Office IT (OIT).  The OIT group is responsible for the Foundation’s internal computing needs.  This includes things like fixing the printers, getting new workstations online, as well as just making sure the internet stays up so the staff can keep working.  We’re just like any other in-company IT staff.

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