Daily Archives: December 16, 2008

Wiki Software

Software,

I used to run a website for traveling by rail in the United States. I let it falter, and eventually took it down. But I still have the domain, and am working to bring it back as a wiki.

The first step in that process was selecting which wiki software to use. I have a few requirements for the site:

  • Availability of both WYSIWYG (friendly for beginners) and non-WYSIWYG editors
  • A number of nice-looking themes to choose from
  • Nice to have: a hierarchy or category system
  • The ability to search within only a particular section or category in the hierarchy
  • Easy to maintain software; not having tons of plugins to keep up-to-date for security
  • Stellar spam prevention
  • Nice to have: ability to redirect people to the new page after a rename

I’m frustrated that there is no wiki out there that does all of these. There are quite a few that do all but one, but which one they omit varies.

My two finalists were MoinMoin and MediaWiki.

MoinMoin

MoinMoin will let you easily define arbitrary categories (by creating a wiki page following a certain name). The search screen automatically presents checkboxes for restricting searches to a particular category. Some reviews have complained about its anti-spam features, but they are all talking about older versions and they seem to have done some work on this lately.

MoinMoin has tons of features and is easy to set up and maintain. But here’s where it falls down: themes.

Over at moinmo.in, there is a “theme market” for themes. Only most of the themes there haven’t been compatible with the current MoinMoin release since about 2005. Most of the rest have one download, then a long discussion page full of mixed bug reports, diffs, and non-diff “edit this to make it work” comments. Most of these don’t state what version of the theme they apply to. Most themes won’t work with current browsers and Moin releases without them. UGH. After discussing on #moin, I’ll probably go in there and at least organize the ThemeMarket page by release.

MediaWiki

Then there’s MediaWiki. It’s got a lot of features, and a lot of complexity. It has no current WYSIWYG feature, though apparently there is work on one.

MediaWiki has an amazing category system. It can generate sorted lists of pages in a category, supports subcategories, etc. Surprisingly, though, you can’t search in just one category. (Though it might be possible indirectly via some syntax; not sure.)

Searching in MediaWiki overall is less capable that in MoinMoin.

MediaWiki does offer namespaces, and namespaces are the sole way of searching just one part of a site. They’re used well over at, say, uesp.net. But namespaces are heavy-handed. You have to edit config files to define them, and they bring with them other associated namespaces for discussion and whatnot. It’s not as easy as creating a category in MoinMoin, and might not scale well to lots of future categories.

MediaWiki does appear to have good spam prevention, and support recaptcha.

Conclusions

I eventually selected MoinMoin and have set up most of my content in it. But now that I am to the point of selecting themes, I’m having some second thoughts.

I also looked at DokuWiki. Its design makes me nervous. The user list is stored in a single file. You can’t search by category. You can search by namespace, but there aren’t checkboxes for it in the search screen; you have to know the syntax. WYSIWYG is a plugin. Categories are a plugin. So — too many plugins to maintain, and no real features above MoinMoin.

Administering Dozens of Debian Servers

Debian, ,

At work, we have quite a few Debian servers. We have a few physical machines, then a number of virtual machines running under Xen. These servers are split up mainly along task-oriented lines: DNS server, LDAP server, file server, print server, mail server, several web app servers, ERP system, and the like.

In the past, we had fewer virtual instances and combined more services into a single OS install. This led to some difficulties, especially with upgrades. If we wanted to upgrade the OS for, say, the file server, we’d have to upgrade the web apps and test them along with it at the same time. This was not a terribly sustainable approach, hence the heavier reliance on smaller virtual environments.

All these virtual environments have led to their own issues. One of them is getting security patches installed. At present, that’s a mainly manual task. In the past, I used cron-apt a bit, but it seemed to be rather fragile. I’m wondering what people are using to get security updates onto servers in an automated fashion these days.

The other issue is managing the configuration of these things. We have some bits of configuration that are pretty similar between servers — the mail system setup, for instance. Most of them are just simple SMTP clients that need to be able to send out cron reports and the like. We had tried using cfengine2 for this, but it didn’t work out well. I don’t know if it was our approach or not, but we found that hacking cfengine2 after making changes on systems was too time-consuming, and so that task slipped and eventually cfengine2 wasn’t doing what it should anymore. And that even with taking advantage of it being able to do things like put the local hostname in the right places.

I’ve thought a bit about perhaps providing some locally-built packages that establish these config files, or load them up with our defaults. That approach has worked out well for me before, though it also means that pushing out changes isn’t a simple hack of a config file somewhere anymore.

It seems like a lot of the cfengine2/bcfg tools are designed for environments where servers are more homogenous than ours. bcfg2, in particular, goes down that road; it makes it difficult to be able to log on to a web server, apt-get install a few PHP modules that we need for a random app, and just proceed.

Any suggestions?