Server Setup

Revision as of 02:09, 23 June 2011

This page documents setting up the servers running TICC's wiki, forum, and InkSurvey.

Preliminaries (Definitions/Notes/etc.)

Hardware

Software

Packages

Installed Packages

Other programs

yum install sudo wget make mlocate nano zip unzip man

Configuration File Changes

Setup

Making Bootable Media with a Kickstart file

mkisofs -o /home/fedora-kickstart.iso -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -J -R -V “Fedora” .

Boot the right kernel

wget http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/centos/5/os/x86_64/isolinux/vmlinuz
wget http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/centos/5/os/x86_64/isolinux/initrd.img

title Install CentOS
    root (hd0,0)
    kernel /install/vmlinuz ks=http://ticc.mines.edu/ks.cfg
    initrd /install/initrd.img

Setting up the Wiki

1. Download the Mediawiki installation. Current stable release is 1.17.
2. Browse to http://serveraddress/wiki/installation/folder/
3. Click the "set up the wiki" link to start installation.
4. Choose your language.
5. The next page lists what Mediawiki has found out about your server. The following warnings were found on ours, followed by why we could ignore them.
   1. Warning: SQLite is compiled without the FTS3 module, search features will be unavailable on this backend.
      • We ignored this because we are not using SQLite for our backend. We simply use MySQL.
   2. Warning: Could not find eAccelerator, APC, XCache or WinCache. Object caching is not enabled.
      • This would speed up our installation, but is something we do not care to bother with at the moment.
   3. Warning: The intl PECL extension is not available to handle Unicode normalization, falling back to slow pure-PHP implementation.
      • Right now, we do not run a high enough traffic site to warrant my bothering with this for too long. At some point in the future, I may look into this, but for now, I'm ignoring it.
6. Read the terms, accept them, and move on to database setup.
7. On this page, we set it up as:
   1. Database host: localhost
   2. Database name: wiki
   3. Database table prefix: left blank
   4. Database username and password: We set these to something that made sense to us.
8. On the next page for web access, we left it the same as the account created last page.
9. We set the Storage Engine to InnoDB and the encoding to Binary.
10. Name your wiki (ours is Physiki), leave the project namespace the same, and set up your initial Administrator account. Don't forget to set the e-mail.
11. We then chose to keep going with configuration. On the next page, we chose to do "Account Creation Required," and "GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 or Later," although this comes down to personal preference or the needs of your site.
12. We set the return e-mail address to webmaster@ticc.mines.edu, since we're going to set up e-mail services on our server, soon.
13. File uploads is disabled for us for a moment until we change it through settings files. We did not enable the instant commons option since we do not use it.
14. Click continue and then continue again to install.
15. There's another step, I think it's copying the LocalSettings.php file over to the wiki directory, but I'm on a ssh tunnel, so I think it mucked up slightly, so I just downloaded it from the server and scp-ed it over.

Forum Setup

I'm going to assume you've already done a few things:

• Created a database server
• Created a database for the forum on the server (I'll call ours "forum")
• Installed and configured a working web server, with php

Installing your forum

1. Navigate to your web folder on your server
2. wget phpBB-3.0.8.zip, or current release.
   1. If you wish, you can change the phpbb folder name to something like "forum"
3. Navigate to your folder in your web browser (for us, ticc.mines.edu/forum/)
4. Click on the Install tab and make sure you have all of the pre-reqs. Click Continue

Extra Notes

External Links