I have a functioning mediawiki installation, with a lot of extensions and users, on a production machine. I'm moving the whole shebang over to a different machine, and have most things worked out, except I'll explain what happened, which might be a good script for a sysadmin horror film.
1) installed and configured, on new machine, mysql and php-mysql, and reinstalled mediawiki (new OS CentOS; old OS Fedora), apache, exim, mailman, etc. etc.
2) I presume (excuse the fundamental question) that I have to recreate the important databases (wikidb for example) by hand (I used phpMyadmin), before reloading mysql with the db dump I did with mysqldump. This I did and the reload did seem to load without problems.
3) I ran into a problem with apache2 complaining that pcre (the perl compatible regex library) didn't understand UTF-8 (sorry don't have the exact error as you'll understand in a moment). Yet pcre reported it was compiled with UTF-8.
4) it was late. maybe you're familiar with this story. I thought, well, yum has worked so nicely so far, I'll just reinstall pcre after removing it, and see if that helps.
5) yum -y remove pcre
6) sshd gone, exim gone, .... system hosed.
so, to cut this down to a simple question:
anyone have any insight for the pcre problem, which will surely crop up again after an OS reload? sorry I can't be more specific about the error, the logfiles are inaccessible now. The pcre problem caused mediawiki to issue the error message on the webpage itself, and also apache logged it.
-- Rob Lingelbach rob@colorist.org http://www.colorist.org/robhome.html