Ian Hayhurst


So long Wikkawiki, it's been a fun ride,

A little more about me..

Interests


Photography http://www.flickr.com/photos/imh
Gallery
@ me on twitter (same username as wikki)

I am an 'Informatics IT specialist' er that's a UNIX sysadmin for a large Agrochemical company, in the Research and Development IS department (as opposed to the IS department that services the business) We support the company scientific research community. More specifically, in my case Chemistry Informatics systems.
 


My Interest in Wikka


I have an internal (intranet) install of Wikka Wiki. This is quite surprising / unusual / subversive in an organisation that is unfortunate strongly orientated towards applications that have a particular vendor bias (I'll leave that to your imagination.... you don't have to think too hard to guess which it might be)

The use of Wikka is an experiment In our organisation (and seemingly very successful so far) that sprang from a meeting following a periodic re-organisation of the department that left us very much spread over UK, mainland Europe and the U.S. but with the requirement to work in a much more co-ordinated way. Intranets were used (in my opinion) in a awkward or unimaginative manner and perceived as a mechanism for location of information stored largely wordprocessor / spreadsheet documents. This was something along the lines of a slightly more colourful file share and quite static. Access to this required considerable inertia as the prefered method was via frontpage. Islands of information become stale and if you found what you were looking for it was rarely current.


What I'm trying to acomplish (With this page)


A sort of blog of the journey along the lines of:-

How the interest grew, Reactions, what worked, what didn't, features that help, ideas for what is required...
how to explain categories to people (harder than you think)
Upgrade Migration experiences (started with 1.1.5.3 now on 1.1.6.0 with lots of cutomisations

Hardware


Started off with running our installation on an HP / Compaq Alpha
DS10 with Gentoo Linux, Gigabit ethernet...
(Nothing wrong with Tru64 infact it's a fine OS more later...)
I converted the box to Gentoo linux as an experiment to run some alternative architectures for
a server farm (we do a fair amount with server farms for compute intensive chemo/bioinformatics)
actually so far I'm very happy with my little Gentoo/GNU Linux on Alpha... for a bigger system I miss the flexability that the Tru64 ADVFS filesystem brings

UPDATE August 2005 now running on a HP DL360 Dual p4 2.4Ghz, and 4 x 36 GB scsi RAID 0+1 with Gentoo linux, mmm nice

The second Wiki (development) is on an HP DL360 Dual p4 2.4Ghz, and 4 x 36 GB scsi RAID 0+1 running SLES8


18 July 2006
does & in comment break mindmap of recent changes ?
not on this wiki

10 May 2006

With 3 wikies running out of the same server now problems come to light all the time...(more to do with more eyes than multi wiki's however todays problems one was due to session leakage .. Users from one wiki were able to own pages on another without registering... that was solved by adding
session_name($wakkaConfig["wakka_name"]);
#just above the session_start(); in wikka.php

as detailed in Olivier Perron's note on http://wush.net/trac/wikka/ticket/81
Which brought to light another problem; my wakka_name had an & in it which:-
a) Broke the rss feed revisions on the page.
b) Stopped the session_name fix working for trails/breadcrumb feature WikiBreadcrumb (second revision using sessions) which had been showing pages from the other wiki's on the server.

Also sorted out an oddity in IE (which people are stuch with in this corporate environment) clicking on a jpeg file in a files dialog box (the standard and advanced versions of the files handler files.xmp.php iIE will download it to save but not open if you pick that option... after reading over 40 different "solutions" the one that worked was to add:-

Header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0');
Header('Pragma: public');

to the headers section.

16 December 2005

After a year of wikka wiki at work and it's been a raging success (and should continue to be) I think I'll try and use it to run my personal website which is designed to be a sort of note pad for me Wikka should be ideal for this, as a note pad should just be there when you need it Editing html can be tedious at the moment it means starting vi or textpad depending on the system I'm using getting a current version of the page via scp ofr ftp then editing, preview then upload, check... hardly spontaneous or handy. I'm not looking for a date driven blog more a non-linear set of thoughts. I'l probably do the conversion over Christmas

A working example:- this site uses onxy.. I think I'll go with the magpirss though



13 October 2005

17 September 2005

-- August 205


19 Apr 2005

#renders bullett points over the image
<<
{{image class="left" url="http://ssbob.rt.intra/uploads/KilburnHighRd/kilburn.gif"}}

===Area of Expertise===
	- Oracle DBA & Systems Administration
	- Physical & Logical Database Design,
	- Technical Architecture,
	- Training 
<<

Here's the alternative with some inlined HTML
<<
""<img src="http://ssbob.rt.intra/uploads/KilburnHighRd/kilburn.gif" alt="mugshot" style="float: left; margin: 5px; padding: 10px;">""


===Area of Expertise===
	- Oracle DBA & Systems Administration
	- Physical & Logical Database Design,
	- Technical Architecture,
	- Training 
<<


15 Mar 2005
16 Feb 2005

RSS: This never worked on my Gentoo linux box..
reporting the error
error on line 130 of /var/www/localhost/htdocs/Wikka/3rdparty/plugins/onyx-rss/onyx-rss.php: The specified file could not be opened.

but was fine on A SLES9 box, with a clone of the the wikka site...
The problem obviously futhur afield than the Wikka install....I'm embarrassed to say how long that took to track down but finally it came down to the php.ini file the line that says
allow_url_fopen = On
# this was set to Off in Gentoo linux install! so no working onyx-rss parser

Still having trouble.. probably a firewall thing
RSS is alive and well here though I guess I'll keep working on it

We have a second wiki now (also Wikka)... to avoid having to share out the webroot to windows via samba to allow my old group (Bioinformatics) to maintain their website now their number is reduced and I'm supporting Chemoinformatics I have set them up a wiki, Oohh goodie we can use interwiki links internally now ! The intention was to provide
an 'easy to edit' website but the users are interested in adding stuff so it should get interesting. Firstly they missed the share price applet. a preoccupation of folks in large corporate entities composed of other historical (and smaller entities) seems to be watching the stock of the previous parent companies of which their nest egg consists

Ok so php looks sufficiently like perl that I feel I can have a go....
Looks like I need to create an action to display the applet as quoted html wasn't enough
hint from the freemind.php which seems to do this
Obviously this shareprice.php is only useful to someone with the applet...
but now I can wrap applets up as pseudo actions to insert them in the wiki, easier method anyone?


<?php
$output = "<applet code=\"Basic_Colour_XML_Table.class\" codebase=\"http://chemistry.rt.intra/shareprice/\" h
eight=110 width=450 archive=\"xerces.jar,XMLParser.jar\">\n"
.
"<param name=\"appletfont\" value=\"Verdana\">\n".
"<param name=\"appletfontstyle\" value=\"PLAIN\">\n".
"<param name=\"appletfontsize\" value=\"12\">\n".
"<param name=\"appletbgcolour\" value=\"eeeeee\">\n".
"<param name=\"appletfgcolour\" value=\"000000\">\n".
"<param name=\"filename\" value=\"price.xml\">\n".
"<param name=\"shareList\" value=\"XYZ.L PQR.D\">\n".
"<param name=\"updatetime\" value=\"10\">\n".
"  Sorry, your browser just won't let you see the current price - it doesn't run Java.\n".
"</applet>\n";
print ($output);
?>


23 Feb 2005

18 Feb 2005
Noticed ChristianBarthelemy has posted something about AD Activedirectory intergration, ActiveDirectory
I'm looking forward to this as getting intranet users to sign on to yet another system is a bar to entry

12 Sep 2008
revisiting AD authentication. Apache and AD play nicely together using apache module mod_auth_ntlm_winbind for NTLM2 authentication
svn co svn://svnanon.samba.org/lorikeet/trunk/mod_auth_ntlm_winbind
just need to map existing users to probably different AD usernames
will tidy up notes and post (notes I wrote for getting Oracle's Apex to authenticate to AD)

May 2011
Still using Wikka Wiki within the organisation though the Philistines Students want to migrate it all to mediawiki
Wikka wiki as with stood the onslaught of Sharepoint and still continues to be useful

Oct 2011
This years students passed and very few of this years do code... the threatened mediawiki never appeared.
I now either upgrade a clone of production version (1.1.6.2)and fix the years of mods that break...
or install fresh and migrate useful content or something in-between. Looking at the new editor I think it's time we upgraded

Oct 2012
Must be an annual thing as here I am cloning a wiki onto much newer php in order to upgrade

July 2014 still going strong, really must update both the machine and the wiki

May 2015 Upgrading from 1.1.6.2 to 1.3.6, on virtual machine running Centos7, (and MariaDB replacing MySQL)
updrade ok, fixed NTLM login / LDAP lookup in AD (winbind separator and silent lack of php LDAP module were stumbling blocks there),
now starting on years of added actions

July 2018 Back at porting actions etc. into 1.3.7, preparing WikiPageWatch for contribution as wiki plugin

CategoryUsers
Comments
Comment by NilsLindenberg
2005-02-11 17:19:22
Hi Ian! I am looking forward to read your experiences. It is always good to know what can be done better. Btw, could you add CategoryUsers to your page?
Comment by IanHayhurst
2005-02-14 14:14:14
Nils, oops... I'm always onto my users to add the category link , Cheers Ian
Comment by NilsLindenberg
2005-02-14 14:18:29
:)
Comment by GiorgosKontopoulos
2006-03-14 12:40:41
Damn Ian!!
Those are some beautiful images in photo.net
Comment by IanHayhurst
2006-04-03 06:29:45
Thanks Giorgos!
Comment by DarTar
2006-05-10 11:57:49
Ian, if you have found potential bugs and at the same time a tentative patch, why not create a ticket on the tracker?
Comment by IanHayhurst
2006-05-11 04:02:05
Dario, Yes I agree for the files use in IE , What about problems in Beta / contributed features (WikiBreadcrumb and enhanced files action.) and the use of & in wakka_name ?
Comment by BloodshotEye
2010-08-20 16:53:57
Hi, Ian. I can't contact you via your website as you removed your e-mail address.
I am interested in Ann's version of WikkaForum and this appears to be the only place I can get to ask you about it. I am developing a wiki for a senior school in Cape Town and really like Wikka's approach to a wiki.
I'm not sure (new user at this site) if you can get my e-mail address somehow, so in case not: darryl DOT penny AT gmail DOT com (replace the DOTs and the AT with the real McCoy. Cheers
Comment by BrianKoontz
2012-10-16 22:15:43
Ian, thanks for your continued support! Let us know how the migration goes...a few months back I finally got around to upgrading the main wikkawiki site to 1.3 from a 1.1.6.x version, wasn't too bad.
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