[Mediawiki-l] dumpBackup and symbolic links

[Sullivan, James (NIH/CIT) [C]]

Hey all,

I've installed version 1.7.1of MediaWiki on Fedora running Apache 2, PHP
5.1.4 and MySQL 5.
I am trying to set up a farm as described in
http://prevolution.org/mediawikifarm.
A quick discription of my setup:
1) Install Mediawiki once into /var/www/html/main as usual and complete
the installation.
2) Create a new directory /var/www/html/wiki1.
2a) Make symbolic links to everything in /var/www/html/main.
2b) Delete the link to LocalSettings.php.
2c) Delete the link to the config directory and copy it over with all of
its contents.
2d) Use a browser and go to the wiki1 web address and set up with
separate DB name, DB username,  sitename, etc. and save.
2e) Copy LocalSettings.php out of wiki1/config to the wiki1 directory
and lock up the config directory.

At this point I now have a new wiki (wiki1) which has a separate
database but allows me to upgrade both "main" and "wiki1" by just
upgrading "main".  I can also create wiki2, wiki3, etc etc and this has
been working well so far.  The users and pages are separate, each within
its own database and  each is called as http://myservername/<wikiname>
where wikiname is the name of the wiki (main, wiki1, wiki2, etc...). 

So far so good.

Today I decided to copy all the pages in wiki1 from my server to a new
server.  I decided to use the maintenance script "dumpBackup" since I
only wanted the pages (not the users, etc...).  So I did this and it
gave me XML output but it was the output of the "main" database.  I also
did a dumpBackup of "main" and got the exact same XML.  I checked the
script and database and could only conclude that somehow something was
going down a "wiki1" symbolic link into the "main" directory and coming
up in the main directory.  So to test this I removed all symbolic links
in wiki1 and copied the files and directories that were linked from
wiki1 to main into the wiki1 directory, then ran dumpBackup again.  This
time it gave me XML for wiki1.

My question is, is the dumpBackup script able to handle symbolic links
properly and if it does what else might be going on?

-Jim

----------------------------
James E. Sullivan
sullivan at mail.nih.gov
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