|
Set Up Wiki in 5 Minutes Flat
Here is how to deploy a wiki server on a virtual appliance in your
organization to share knowledge. Being a virtual appliance, there are no
installation or configuration hassles
Sanjay Majumder
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
As we all know, Wiki is a Web-enabled software that allows you to freely
create and edit Web pages on the fly using any Web browser. This is usually
popular among communication groups and forums, where it allows groups to
contribute content. In simple words, Wiki is an editable website hosted on a Web
server.
It can be used for knowledge sharing. The most popular example of a Wiki is wikipedia.com.
The beauty of the whole project is that the user does not need to know HTML to
be able to do this. In this article we will show you how to deploy a Wiki
website for your organization, and that too without setting up a separate
machine for it.
For those who are new to the term 'virtual appliance', they can refer to
this month's cover story and read the Server Consolidation and Virtualization
section. MediaWiki virtual appliance is a virtual machine image that comes
bundled with OS, PHP, MySQL, Apache, MediaWiki and the rPath Appliance Agent.
This provides a pre-configured and self-contained, updatable Wiki website on
virtual machine.
You can download the appliance image from the link given in the Direct Hit
box. Here you will find images for running the appliance on VMware Player or Xen.
We have used VMware Player, which is available for free at http://vmware.com.
Once you have downloaded the VM image, which is in form of a compressed zip
file, extract the actual image files from this zip file and you get two files
'vehera-base-1.6.8-x86.vmx' and 'vehera-base-1.6.8-x86.vmdk'. The first
file is a virtual machine configuration file and the second one has a hard disk
image of the virtual machine. If your physical machine has less than one GB RAM,
you have to edit the configuration file first and change the RAM allocation.
 |
| This is the main page of MediaWiki. Here, you can create new communities, discussion forums and highlight current events |
By default, the MediaWiki virtual appliance is configured for 512 MB RAM. In
order to change the RAM allocation, open the vehera-base-1.6.8-x86.vmdk file in
a notepad and change memory size to 256 “memsize = "256". Save this
file and launch VMware player and open the vehera-base-1.6.8-x86.vmdk. This will
start MediaWiki virtual appliance inside the VMware player. Once the virtual
appliance is booted, you will be shown the URL using which you can configure and
use it.
Configuring MediaWiki
Open a Web browser on a remote machine and type in URL https://<Ip _Address_of
Media_Wiki: 8003. This will bring up an 'admin authentication' Web page.
Here give admin as username and password as the password. Now on the home page,
it will show you a wizard that will lead to configuring the appliance admin
password, IP address, Email address etc. Save all these settings and logout from
the admin Web page. Next step is to set up the Wiki according to your
requirements. For this again open a Web browser from a remote machine and type
the URL http://IP_address_of _Media_Wiki/ wiki. This will open a Web page
showing MediaWiki installation wizard. Here you have to configure the Wiki site
according to your needs. Now click on “Setup Wiki” link.
 |
| Media Wiki Virtual Appliance running inside VMware Player. One can access it using the url of the host location |
Note: Before filling the data, you have to set the MySQL user and password.
For this, go the VMware player and open the running Linux shell. Now issue the
following command to change the password.
# myseladmin –u root password <password
that you want to set>
On the next page, the installation also checks whether all required
components are working fine on the appliance or not. Scroll down the page, you
will be asked for some mandatory information such as Wiki Name, Admin
username/password and DB username/DB password. Give DB username as root and the
password that you have set. Also fill rest of the entries and click on 'install
wiki' button. This will install MediaWiki on your appliance. Finally, open the
terminal console of your running appliance and issue this command.
# cp /srv/mediawiki/config/LocalSettings.php /srv/mediawiki/
With this your Wiki page is ready for you. Access it from your Web browser
with its URL and enjoy!
Page(s) 1
|
Print
Comment
Email
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
Twitter
