Hey, Unfortunately I'm not experienced at all with setting up wiki farms (hence I joined this mailing list to maybe learn a thing or two). It is my understanding that when setting up wiki farms, there are a number of specific goals to be achieved: - Centralized configuration of the individual wikis - Centralized authentication and authorization - Shared local files and resources - Shared wiki files (i.e., images with ForeignAPIRepo) With these goals in mind, there are numerous different methods of achieving all of these goals. Centralized configuration is simple enough: just have a CommonSettings.php or something similar, or use puppet or something. Centralized authentication can be done either by using a shared DB so that the user logins are all the same, by using OpenID or some other authentication delegation service, or by attempting to use Wikimedia's custom SSO service E:CentralAuth. For most wikis, the first is the easiest option and the second is the best option, although it'd be nice if E:OpenID was a little more stable. I think a nice to-do list for making wikifarms easier to establish is: - Evaluate current wikifarm extensions (e.g., E:WikiFarm), see what they do, and how they can be improved. - Get E:OpenID to a state where it can be easily and stably configured as an inter-wiki authentication service (if it's not at this state already) Thoughts? *-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo(a)gmail.com On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 10:22 AM, Mark A. Hershberger <mah(a)nichework.com>wrote;wrote:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA384 Hi, I'm one of the founders of Orain (https://orain.org), a new non-profit, ad-free wiki farm. I've administrated several wiki farms over the past few years. I've been publishing our configuration and tools on GitHub (https://github.com/orain), and I plan to improve what's already there in the near future. I'm about to leave on vacation for about 10 days, but after that, I plan to put together some documentation regarding the best practices in wiki farm administration. On 8/16/13 10:22 AM, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 3:38 PM, Kudu <kudu(a)riseup.net> wrote: This is extraordinarily helpful. I'll try and look through the configuration when I have free time. Why fix something that's already been fixed? *-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo(a)gmail.com

Wow ! How do we install/configure this extension ? Seems very interesting ! Happy holidays ! J From: wikifarm-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikifarm-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Tyler Romeo Sent: Friday, August 16, 2013 3:53 PM To: Discussion for managers of Wiki Farms Subject: Re: [Wikifarm] Welcome to WikiFarm On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 3:38 PM, Kudu &lt;kudu(a)riseup.net&gt; wrote: I'm one of the founders of Orain (https://orain.org), a new non-profit, ad-free wiki farm. I've administrated several wiki farms over the past few years. I've been publishing our configuration and tools on GitHub (https://github.com/orain), and I plan to improve what's already there in the near future. I'm about to leave on vacation for about 10 days, but after that, I plan to put together some documentation regarding the best practices in wiki farm administration. This is extraordinarily helpful. I'll try and look through the configuration when I have free time. Why fix something that's already been fixed? -- Tyler Romeo Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com <http://www.whizkidztech.com/> | tylerromeo(a)gmail.com

OK, so I did a quick look through the Orain framework, and the crux of the setup is basically a dynamically configured SiteConfiguration object combined with the custom Extension:CreateWiki. It's an interesting setup, and it's definitely a good base, but IMHO if we're going for the best solution then sysadmins shouldn't even have to go that far to set this up. *-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo(a)gmail.com On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 4:34 PM, Pierre Labrecque &lt;pierre.labrecque(a)live.ca&gt;wrote;wrote:

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 7:47 PM, Mark A. Hershberger &lt;mah(a)nichework.com&gt;wrote;wrote: Basically, take a look at this file: https://github.com/Orain/ansible-playbook/blob/master/roles/mediawiki/files… You shouldn't have to write a 619 line configuration file just to get your wiki farm up and running. Also, there's literally no documentation for how to use SiteConfiguration. *-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo(a)gmail.com

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 8:06 PM, Mark A. Hershberger &lt;mah(a)nichework.com&gt;wrote;wrote: Yeah good point, and I think fixing that problem is kind of out of the scope of the wikifarm problem. Maybe for now we should focus on documentation, and documenting the best method for getting a wikifarm running, and from there we can analyze our own docs and come up with ways to make things easier. *-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo(a)gmail.com

Tyler Romeo, 16/08/2013 17:48: I find this list useful, Tyler. Is there a wiki version of it? I think it would be useful to first of all define or list or brainstorm the issues this list is about. I'd like to add backup (private) and dump production + archiving (public) to the items, for instance, as someone who archived a few tens thousands wikis on archive.org. ;) Nemo