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Grip was a shell and web hosting facility offered to regular Wikimedia contributors, for their needs in their Wikimedia or extra activities not covered by the Toolserver or by the Wikimedia Labs infrastructure.

The server

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  • Runs under FreeBSD 8.1
  • Tries to offer an up-to-date a staging/development/testing environment, with the last software versions each time it matters for one of our users (like PHP)
  • Provides nginx (for regular websites or as proxy to rails/python/J2EE servers, which are welcome) and Apache webservers (for quick public_html folders, with SuEXEC for PHP and other CGI)
  • Provides also an experimental playground features like a dn42 link or a Debian GNU/kFreeBSD jail
  • 2 Gb RAM, CPU Nano VIA

What you can host

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  • a traditional web hosting (HTML/PHP)
  • a more complex web hosting (nginx + J2EE/Python/Ruby/custom code)
  • an application hosting (like bots)
  • an always-on IRC shell account
  • a shell account offering a comprehensive set of tools to develop (vi, emacs, git, hg, darcs, fossil, etc.) or to have fun (figlet, cmatrix)

Procedure to join

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  • Generate a SSH key
  • Ask your account whether on IRC (I'm mainly follow #wikipedia-fr, #wikimedia-commons, #mediawiki), whether on the project talk page (please provide the desired username, what you plan to do with the server and a SSH public key)

Wikimedian accounts

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User page Login Hosted stuff
fr:Utilisateur:Darkknow darkknow Personal blog
User:Dereckson dereckson MediaWiki development, IRC, Web
User:Irønie ironie Bot adding authority notices on fr.wikip

Notes

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  • The server does not provide database replication, you need the Toolserver for that.
  • The server is hosted at Online, a French low cost hosting facilities better known under the name Dedibox. Some projects, like en. it. and nl.wikip block the full ISP IP ranges, you'll so need to request an ip exempt flag for your bot, in addition to the bot flag (or before if you need to test).
  • The server is semi public, collaborative and configured in these goal. You're directly on the server without chroot. A lot of FreeBSD servers protects commands like ps auxw or sockstat, so you can view only your process, this is not the case here. It means, if you've sensitive data in your home directory, you chmod 711 it. If you've top defense confidential data, you put it elsewhere or you encrypt it.