Gentoo Install

[mrepicky]

I ran a gentoo install with great success and now have my own dekiwiki for use at work. Shared it out to 4 coworkers and we're having some fun with it.

Throughout the install i noted just some very minor additional installs from what were listed in the other installs, but i got it all up and working with Apache2, PHP5, MySQL5.

If anyone is interested i can try to retrace only the relevant steps and get it into an installation write-up on Gentoo.

There was only one part that was actual trouble and only one or two small things from a security point of view that i was concerned about. When running the install.sh i ran into an error with creating the tables in the database due to an overflow of one of the KEYs for a table. Because UTF8 stores 1 character in 3 bytes, you can only store 333 characters and one of the keys was trying to take a varchar(255) and adding another (128) to that.

My solution was to drop the database and recreate it using latin1 as the charset. Then i re-ran the install.sh and it finished just fine. I'm not sure if i'm going to run into future problems because of this or not. But i'm sure i'll find out soon enough. I tried to alter a few latin1 = false areas to true, but that caused other things to fail.

One of the lapses in security i saw that made me differ my install was that i didn't like the root mysql user password being used for the MWSearch.conf. So instead i didn't set that part up from the start and waited for the wikiuser account and password to be defined. I then put those credentials into the conf and ran the MWUpdater --rebuild by hand after the install.sh completed.

One other step just from a pure security standpoint was that the box this was set up on wasn't aware of any mail server and was finding an externally facing mail server to send out user emails from. By using PEAR to install NET_SMTP and Mail, i was able to direct it to an internal mail server so that credentials weren't being passed outside and then back inside.

Very satisfied as i've had this need for a wiki for a long time. Can't wait to test it out to its fullest.

Thanks for the product, lemme know if you need any information of my errors or the extra steps i took during the install process.

./Salute


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[AaronF]

If you like you could add an install guide here: http://doc.opengarden.org/DekiWiki/Installation_Guide :-). There isn't currently a Gentoo guide.

[mrepicky]

I seemed to have disappeared from here and not left behind a helpful install guide... Shame on me. Also shame on me for not having updated my software, but good news, I'm back!

I think i'm going to try to work 2 installs, 1 is an upgrade from my current gooseberry++ to the latest release and then potentially perform an install from a blank Gentoo if i have the time. If i can get them working well, then i'll try to remember to put up the install guide this time.

Any suggestions before i start on the upgrade from G++ to JC?


P.S. Deki has served us well, thanks for the awesome product, can't wait to try out new features.

[SteveB]

Do a search on the forums as it has been discussed before. Others have done it, but it required incrementally installing Hayes, then Itasca, then Jay Cooke, which is not cool. If you attempt it, it would be great figuring out why G++ cannot be upgraded to JC in one pass.

[mrepicky]

Any thoughts on whether it is primarily a database disparity that requires the incremental upgrades?

I'm gonna take a serious look into the install of Hayes and compare it with G++ and then look at '/usr/bin/updateWiki.sh' of the Itasca install and see what that does for Hayes and see where things look like they are diverging.

Even for gooseberry++ it requires Mysql5/PHP5/Apache2, so there can't be much different required in the configuration of those core services, i'm hoping.

Just to help out with the start of things, i'm currently at:
MySQL 5.0.40
PHP5.2.2-pl1-gentoo
Apache 2.2.4-r1
mono-1.2.3.1

I expect to update all software to as current as possible while still on G++.

[mrepicky]

One big difference that i'm worried about from G++ to any of the others is the introduction of the 'mindtouch.deki.startup.xml' file. I've done a search of my system for any such file and come up blank.

Any clues on where to start, i found this thread here that suggests a normal file: http://forums.opengarden.org/showthread.php?t=359&highlight=gooseberry+upgrade

Doesn't look like anything too complicated, but does it go into /etc as suggested there or in the /var/www/wiki directory?


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[SteveB]

The startup.xml file was added in Hayes.

[mrepicky]

I am taking steps on making this migration, and found that i didn't make out as well as i'd hoped. I had a few failures with the upgrading process, so decided to use the mysql dump to make a listing of the pages we wanted to keep, which we could put back in by hand if need be in the new wiki.

However, here i am, and the new wiki isn't coming up :( . I followed the instructions from http://wiki.developer.mindtouch.com/MindTouch_Deki/Installation_and_Upgrade/Linux_package-based_installation_(BETA)/Installing_Deki_Wiki_package_on_Gentoo and got through the install process, at least according to the config web install i did. I have the dekiwiki daemon saying that it starts ok, but now when i visit the homepage for the wiki i get a message from firefox saying that the page redirects in a fashion that will never complete and may be caused by rejecting cookies.

I went through and checked my options, ensured that cookies are being accepted, then went in and deleted all cookies related to the wiki and tried again. I get a new cookie from FF for PHPSESSID and it looks fine, but i'm wondering if there is an issue with the save_path for the session? I went into the php.ini and put in a save_path for /tmp anyways and it still isn't working.

Any ideas what could still be holding me back? Where to start looking? As i said, i can get to /config/index.php and run the web install just fine, but going to the wiki doesn't appear to bring up anything correctly.


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[mrepicky]

Just to mention all the logs are blank for deki-api and access|error-dekiwiki.

[mrepicky]

Ok, so apparently after doing some modifications i've gotten some success in displaying a page. I'm hitting a new problem however.

I can pull up the homepage with no problem and see the default content. But when i go to create a user account or register i get a blank page. Any ideas?

[mrepicky]

Ok, so fscking and fiddling with the apache installation and my vhosts has brought up both my wiki's and i'm pretty happy that i can now start migrating content. Nicely i named one DB as wiki and the other as wikidb, so i can have them simultaneously operating on the same box.

My newest problem is that it doesn't seem to be able to access email, but i'm not sure the host has any kind of sendmail installed. I'm not sure if the lack of email is a problem that prevents the ability for users to register, but we have a limited user base and i logged in and simply created the users.

Are there any tricks to migrating data between the databases? I'm about to take a closer look at the differences in the database and whether i might be able to dump some of the content from the previous wiki into the new one.

For anyone looking to migrate from gooseberry to Jay Cooke, i'd recommend setting up vhosts in this manner and moving the content by hand or maybe i'll find some easy way to execute a sql dump and write some simple insert into's that will be handled well by the wiki.

[crb]

Make sure you create the new database with createDB.sh so you get the stored procedures created.

[mrepicky]

Actually my method was to drop the previous database before the installation, and allow the web install to automatically go through it's process. I then went back in and used a mysqldump to restore the older database, but i did it using the name wiki instead of wikidb. Then i also changed the user to be wikiusr instead of wikiuser and made the necessary modifications in the old /var/www/wiki directory, while the new /var/www/dekiwiki directory appears to be working fine.

I don't appear to have any collisions as of yet and the mysqldump should've captured everything that i needed from the database before i dropped it.

[mrepicky]

I'm thinking of using a web crawler to go through and identify the heirarchy of our old wiki and then stripping out just the content related to each page that was user added and using the new desktop connector to just drag and drop the content into the wiki. I'll have to look how it works to see if that's close to what i want.