Wikka : IanHayhurst

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Ian Hayhurst

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 suprising / unusual / subversive in an organisation that is unfortunatle 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 succesful 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 percieved 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 withrunning 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 ammount 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

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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 leekage .. Users from one wiki were able to own pages on anothere 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 odity 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 sucess (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

• Mess with style sheet. Personal requirements and corporate ones are vastly different Luckily the TestSkin page here gives a valuable way to test this, I now have one I'm happy with IanHayhurst.css

• Thinking of using something along the lines of InvisibleWiki but with modifacations to header as well

• Create a 'sticker' to proudly display the wikkawiki engine having gone to all the trouble to supress the wiki look my attempt lives WikkaSticker

• Add redirects from various static pages to the wikka versions

• Setup a subdomain so it appears in the root something like wikka.ianhayhurst.co.uk/PageName rather than www.ianhayhurst.co.uk/Wikka/PageName oh and turn on the mod rewrite rule in the config

• 2 Dec 2005 Oooh goodie looks like some work has been done on this NewRSSAction with a patch for proxy
  15 minutes later It works !! (had to apply the patch lines manualy as Magpierss download was 0.72 and the proxy patch is against 0.71

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



13 October 2005

• Added ChristianBarthelemy ActiveDirectory to my development copy, It works a treat just try and log out... once your machine name is in, you're logged on permenantly, and that is the problem if anyone else uses my machine then they are me, even when logged onto AD with their own profile. Just got the Vintela SSO module into apache which works with firefox but seems to have a problem with IE (negotiated Kerberos token is too big for the defaukt 8K header bufer !, odd since I expect that it's the same token firefox sends) recompiling apache with bigger recivve limits (an upgrade fron 2.0.25 to 2.0.54 required) just segfaults the httpd daemon when IE sends a token might try an open source SSO module, when it works with both browsers we'll have a go an altering the action to record the REMOTE_USER in the extra field in the wikka_users table... probably need some thought of fall through as I dont want to lock non-kerberos (or AD authenticated linux users out (namely me!)

17 September 2005

• People raving about 'wiki technology' every where (a good thing) a bug in glibc with linux threads on Alpha is leaving defunct processes all over the place, http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=100259 recompiling with NPTL (Native POSIX Thread Library) and 2.4 upgrade to 2.6 Kernel leaves me with a zombie free system but mysql daemon crashes and restarts everytime the wiki is accessed (the users see this as opposed to the zombies that they didn't) .... quickly build gentoo on a HP DL360 Dual p4 2.4Ghz, 2GB ram and 4 x 36 GB scsi RAID 0+1.. mmm nice ! and use the oportunity to compile in php against the oracle instant client.. gentoo emerge doesnt seem to want me to do this so by hand

  ./configure --with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs2 --host=i686-pc-linux-gnu --prefix=/usr --datadir=/usr/lib/php --with-mysql=/usr \
  --enable-force-cgi-redirect --disable-cgi --with-zlib --with-gettext --with-oci8-instant-client=/lib/instantclient_10_2 \
  --mandir=/usr/share/man --bindir=/usr/bin --sysconfdir=/etc --with-config-file-path=/etc --with-exec-dir=/usr/lib/php/bin\
  --disable-debug --enable-inline-optimization --enable-magic-quotes --enable-sigchild --with-config-file-path=/etc/php/cli-php4 --disable-memory-limit

  
  

-- August 205

• It became apparent on an intranet that users would login but not bother to create a namespace (everyone knows who I am and what I do so why should I ?). We noticed that other wiki implementations create it by default. An alteration to wikka.php was made that created it for the user at registration and cloned a template page to that namespace, additions to wikka.config.php were made to enable / disable the action and define the template page to use. The code is very small but as I didn't write it I will seek permision to post it, (if there's any interest)
  

19 Apr 2005

• Uptake is Sporadic, new groups discovering our wiki all the time, internal publicity would help but I'd rather get interested groups using it regularly rather than 'advertise' get 100 new users in one day that never come back, softly, softly catchee wiki users

• Small bugette, It's popular for users pages to put up a left or right float box, with an image in it and alongside (in the float still) put bullett pointed notes. The Wakka wiki CSS however renders the points inside / over the image, so rather than messing with the CSS and introducing a difficult migration path for upgrades I'm inlining a bit of HTML to fix it

Here's the alternative with some inlined HTML

15 Mar 2005

• Lots of php to pull stuff from oracle (mostly a bug track system) but the guys bring back the data and then use some nasty VB script to hide or show rows based on dropdown selects, shame as it only works in IE, The development has gone a little cold whilst others argue over the most appropriate place to put this stuff.

• RSS: the onyx-rss doesnt cope with proxies so I can pull in intranet feeds but nothing externaly, I did find a sockets based patch to fix this I think somewhere..but lost it again. I thought it was the proxy env var at first but it's probably the onyx-plugin.

16 Feb 2005

RSS: This never worked on my Gentoo linux box..
reporting the error

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 embarased to say how long that took to track down but finally it came down to the php.ini file the line that says

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 stufff 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?

23 Feb 2005

• Developers trying to link in documents on file shares, (rather than read the reams I wrote about uploading them) so a bunch of links appearing that only work in IE in the form \\servername\folder\file.bla firefox doesn't understand them so leaves wikka.php to parse the link resulting in a request to create a page of with a heavily backslached gibberish name.

• Big interest in actions that pull from Oracle, (and lots of pressure) so I've recompiled my php against the Oracle instant client (10g) and had some sucess in getting usefull stuff back ...now that spells a move off the Alpha Linux box as I don't believe Oracle have a client for Alpha linux that I can compile php --with-oci8 against... and Darn it all Some Major project is using the wiki for awareness updates... (actually it's nice to get the exposure, but very hard to move machines now). At least I have a service alias in the DNS so I can move box, then where alias points and they'll never know (but the Intel box has 2 cpu's with 4 x the clockspeed halving the page creation time.... not an issue yet !)
  

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 inbetween. 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

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