MediaWikiInstallation

Getting started

• Machine: itb3
• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installation_guide
• Requirements: PHP5 or later, a database server (MySQL4.x+), and Apache.
• See MediaWikiInstallationPrerequisites for install notes of:
  • MySQL 5.1.34
  • Apache 2.0.52
  • PHP 5.2.9-1
  • phpMyAdmin 2.11.9.5-1

Installation

• Downloaded and un-tar'd into /opt/
• Put a sym link to this from /var/www/html/, w -> /opt/mediawiki-1.14.0.
• Started up httpd and mysqld. Created wikidb database, wikiuser user. (mysql cmd ref)
• Followed instructions; pretty straightforward.

Failure reporting

• Please include all of the lines below when reporting installation problems.

  PHP 5.2.9 installed
  Found database drivers for: MySQL?
  PHP server API is apache2handler; ok, using pretty URLs (index.php/Page_Title)
  Have XML / Latin1-UTF-8 conversion support.
  Session save path (/var/lib/php/session) appears to be valid.
  PHP's memory_limit is 128M.
  Couldn't find Turck MMCache, eAccelerator, APC or XCache; cannot use these for object caching.
  Found GNU diff3: /usr/bin/diff3.
  Couldn't find GD library or ImageMagick?; image thumbnailing disabled.
  Installation directory: /opt/mediawiki-1.14.0
  Script URI path: /w
  Installing MediaWiki? with php file extensions
  Environment checked. You can install MediaWiki?.
  Generating configuration file...
  Database type: MySQL?
  Loading class: DatabaseMysql?
  Attempting to connect to database server as root...success.
  Connected to mysql 5.1.34; enabling MySQL? 4.1/5.0 charset mode
  Database wikidb exists
  Creating tables... done.
  Initializing statistics...
  Granting user permissions to wikiuser on wikidb...success.
  Created sysop account wikiadmin.
  

Administration

• Accessing the database on itb3: mysql -u wikiuser -p
• Good mysql ref
• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Maintenance_scripts
• Edited AdminSettings.php
• Can run php maintenance scripts
• added an extensions package (facebook sharing oh boy); download to ./extensions, modify LocalSettings.
• added extension for google charts
• installed latex on this host: yum install tetex-latex.

Update 1.16 - 16 Jun 2010

• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Upgrading
• itb3:/opt
• http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.16/mediawiki-1.16.0beta3.tar.gz
• From the UPGRADE file:

  === Perform the file upgrade ===
  Replace the existing MediaWiki files with the new. You should preserve the
  LocalSettings.php file and the "extensions" and "images" directories.
  Depending upon your configuration, you may also need to preserve additional
  directories, including a custom upload directory ($wgUploadDirectory),
  deleted file archives, and any custom skins.

• There was no LocalSettings.php file in the unpacked 1.16 directory; copied over from previous 1.1.4
• Copied over images directory; chown/chgrp -R apache.
• Copied over what was in extensions directory (two).
• Copied over AdminSettings.php to top level directory.
• cd'd to ./maintenance directory
• php update.php --aconf ../AdminSettings.php; there were successful checks, but then errors, MediaWikiUpdateDBerrors.
• I changed ownership and permissions for LocalSettings.php file to be the same as before (apache, rw). Re-ran, still problems.
• There is a note: You will need to have $wgDBadminuser and $wgDBadminpassword set in your LocalSettings.php, see there for more info. So I put it in there, as well as AdminSettings.php. No go.
• Try:

  # mysql -u root -p
  Enter password: 
  Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
  Your MySQL connection id is 10
  Server version: 5.1.34 MySQL Community Server (GPL) by Remi
  
  Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.
  
  mysql> use wikidb;
  Reading table information for completion of table and column names
  You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A
  
  Database changed
  mysql> grant usage on *.* to wikiuser@localhost identified by 'wikipasswd';
  Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
  
  mysql> 

• Still no go.
• Try:

  # mysql -u root -p
  mysql> grant all privileges on wikidb.* to wikiuser@localhost;
  mysql> flush privileges;
  mysql> quit;

• Worked! update.php log
• http://itb3.uchicago.edu/w , though no logo
• Configuration:

  === Check configuration settings ===
  
  The names of configuration variables, and their default values and purposes,
  can change between release branches, e.g. $wgDisableUploads in 1.4 is replaced
  with $wgEnableUploads in later versions. When upgrading, consult the release
  notes to check for configuration changes which would alter the expected
  behaviour of MediaWiki.

• Check version: http://itb3.uchicago.edu/w/index.php/Special:Version
• Need to fix logo. copy over image from previous location; modify LocalSettings.php if need be.

Restarting after a long period of neglect 3/4/2011

• itb3.uchicago.edu was extremely sluggish; Nate: The first nameserver in resolve.conf was a 10.x address, the second was a 128 one. Since itb3 has no internal address, I have removed the 10.x internal entry from resolv.conf. I think the slowness was it failing to lookup the first dns server and having to fail over to the second.
• symlink /var/www/html/, w -> /opt/mediawiki was missing - added back; however the page fails to load properly - perhaps now an apache configuration has been lost?
• Suchandra saved a backup (/root/backup/itb3-backup/etc/httpd/conf). Diffing httpd.conf. They are different. Newer version of Apache has been installed, see http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/
• Changed directive option "None" to "All" in

      Options FollowSymLinks
      AllowOverride All

• Still doesn't work.
• Checked ownership and permissions on directories. Looks same.
• Tried switching order of allow,deny to deny,allow: Order deny,allow. No change. Still getting these in error_log: "client denied by server configuration:"...
• # yum install php.x85_64
• # yum install php-mysql.x86_64
• # service httpd reload
• # service httpd reload
• back online

User admin

• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_FAQ#User_administration
• Show user info:

  mysql> use wikidb;
  mysql> show tables;
  mysql> select user_name, user_real_name, user_email from mw_osguser;
  +-----------+----------------+----------------------+
  | user_name | user_real_name | user_email           |
  +-----------+----------------+----------------------+
  | Wikiadmin |                |                      | 
  | Rwg       | Rob Gardner    | rwg@hep.uchicago.edu | 
  +-----------+----------------+----------------------+
  2 rows in set (0.00 sec)
  mysql> 

• Create a user account (must have sysop priv): http://itb3.uchicago.edu/w/index.php/Special:UserLogin