[Mediawiki-l] Hosed MediaWiki installation?

[Curulan Angelicos]

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Greetings all.

I am posting here because I really have no idea where to look next. If
there is a FAQ or some other resource that solves my problem, I will
appreciate the linking and then I will no longer bother you with my
questions. :)

What has happened is that I attempted recently up upgrade an existing
MediaWiki installation from version 1.6.7 to version 1.6.9. I was not
the one who set up the installation, as I am a novice when it comes to
PHP and SQL. Unfortunately, the person who set it up for me has been
unreachable for the past six months.

The upgrade process itself did not give me any obvious errors, however
whenever I, or another user, try to update an article, we are given the
error "Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session
data. Please try again. If it still doesn't work, try logging out and
logging back in."

Logging out then re-logging has no effect; the error still occurs and no
changes can be made to the wiki. Doing a complete file restore from a
backup gives me the same issue. The wiki worked as expected before the
attempted upgrade and downgrade.

Now I come to the questions themselves: Might I have corrupted a file
(or many) or CHMOD in the course of the update? If so, how would I fix
this, since restoring to an earlier file-state does not correct the
issue? If this is not the problem, might there have been damage to the
SQL database somehow?

My other question is (if it comes to this): How simple would to be to
create a *brand new* MediaWiki installation using the data from the old
database? Would it be recommended to use a new database for the tables?
The current MediaWiki tables share a database with a phpMyFAQ
installation -- could this be a problem as well?

Apologies if I am wasting your time here, and if any of this is unclear,
please ask and I will try to better explain.

Thanks in advance!

- - Tom
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OpenPG KeyID: 0x6D06FB67

Clan Website: http://clantitan.org
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