In the last post I’ve talked about moving files from SharePoint to Google Site,
what about a Mediawiki site?
how to export it and upload it?
I’ve already covered the uploading files to Google sites via the Google sites API,
you can use java or python to write a script to mass upload all your files and htmls to your new google site,
but first you need to export everything out of the Mediawiki site.

here is a working method to export your site, these are the steps:

1. install python
2. download the mw2html script
3. export the mediawiki site

so lets start :

Installing python

If you are working from a linux distro with yum its as easy as typing:
yum install python

for windows – you will need to download and install from the python site:
the main python download page for windows
or you can just grab the latest version for September 4 2011 Python 3.2.2
Download and install the msi package.

next step is to add the installation to the computer’s path,
in windows 7  open the start panel and type in the search panel:
“view advance system settings”

press the “Environment Variables”

in the System Variables section search for the “Path” line and choose edit:

now to the end of the line add the path of where you have installed the python,
for example I have installed it to  C:\Python27 , and so i will add at the end of the Path line this:
;C:\Python27
notice the “;”  - this separates between the items on the Path line.

Now if you will type “python -V” on your command line it will run the python binary and will show you your version

now that we have the python working lets move to the next step:

Download the mw2html script

you can find it here:

from Connelly Barnes blog

this script will crawl all over your media wiki site and will grab all the html files and all the attachments there.

Exporting the mediawiki site

usage:
url – URL of mediawiki page to convert to static HTML.
outdir – Output directory.

-f, –force – Overwrite existing files in outdir.
–no-flatten – Do not flatten directory structure.
–no-lower – Retain original case for output filenames and dirs.
–no-clean – Do not clean up filenames (clean replaces
non-alphanumeric chars with _, renames math thumbs).
–no-hack-skin – Do not modify skin CSS and HTML for looks.
–no-made-by – Suppress “generated by” comment in HTML source.
–no-move-href – Disable <movehref> tag. [1]
–no-remove-png – Retain external link PNG icons.
–no-remove-history – Retain image history and links to information.
-l, –left=a.html – Paste HTML fragment file into left sidebar.
-t, –top=a.html – Paste HTML fragment file into top horiz bar.
-b, –bottom=a.html – Paste HTML fragment file into footer horiz bar.
-i, –index=filename – Move given filename in outdir to index.html.

Example Usage:
mw2html http://127.0.0.1/mywiki/ out -f -i main_page.html -l sidebar.html

 Important note:

this script will crawl all over your wiki site, but it does ignore all the files that do not have a link to them,
all the  ”orphan” pages, to solve this issue, instead of pointing to the main page, you can run the mw2html script while pointing to the orphans page,
it will get all the regular files from your site and the Orphan pages.
the link looks like:

http://yourwikisite/wiki/index.php?title=Special:Lonelypages&limit=500&offset=0

now that you have a folder with all your wiki page, you can edit the content of the folder,
remove all the files staring with the word “image_”
remove all the un-needed js files,
and do internal changes in the html files like change the links pointing to the original wiki site and point them to the new Google site URL.

now you can use the Google sites API to upload all your html to your new site.

Technorati Tags: export, Google sites, Google sites API, mw2html, wikimedia

This move allows for a department to share an internal web site that has easy access from home as well with the regular office google account,
it also allows for better collaboration with other branches of the same company located far away – as it saves the need for an office VPN, or the need to connect to a server that is located in a branch in another country,
instead – everybody just connect to Google.

But what do we do if our files are already on the office internal SharePoint?

apparently – the migration processes from SharePoint to Google sites is not as hard ,
here are two working options.

Exporting from SharePoint

Connect to the SharePoint and browse to where you keep the files you wish to move,
choose  ”Actions –>  Open with windows explorer”

you will get and explorer folder listing all the shared files there,
at this point you can select all the folders  and copy them locally to your desktop or to a network share – if the size of the files is too large.

The only folder not to copy over is the “forms” folder – as it is a system folder and you do not need to move it too.

Uploading files to Google Sites

Here we have 2 options:

1. Use native Google Sites files upload option

   This option works well only if you have a very small number of files and folder to upload
   

    

2. Use Google Sites API

    The Google sites API  will allow you to upload multiple files and folders, 
   it support now two languages -

• Java
• Pythonand you can read some more about in the Official Google Enterprise Blog .
  The API allows you to:
• create new sites
• retrieve , create , change and delete pages
• upload and download attachments and files
• change sharing settings
• and manage templates

Technorati Tags: Google sites, Google sites API, SharePoint

This Online tool can be found here:

A very Easy to use online stop watch for all your IT needs, including:

• limiting meeting sections (lets not talk about this subject more than 10 minutes)
• counting time to measure a time limited action (how much time it really took the switch to reboot)
• testing to see if an IT action was able to finish within the time limit set (DB switch should be completed in 5 minutes)

etc …

it has 2 useful modes:

• Stop Watch
• counter

both look like this:

but you setup the counter with this preliminary screen:



Under the Solaris 10 system – or the open Solaris as well,
the service management have been upgraded, and there are great new tools to handle the sysadmin
work on the services.

The long detailed explanation can be found here:
Solaris Service Management Facility – Quickstart Guide

But for the fast paced sysadmin – here is the short version

To see the detailed boot sequence with all the services notices use:

boot -m verbose

Stopping and starting services

stop a running service as well as make sure it wont come back after booting the server:

svcadm disable service_name

Bring the service back up and make sure it starts after boot as well:

svcadm enable service_name

The new and improved services system will also watch over the service, and restart it if it suddenly stop.
but don’t worry – if the service loops and can’t start, after a couple of time the SMF will stop trying to bring it up, and will send you an error for the service.

To stop or start the service temporarily without impacting the startup status of the service use:

svcadm -t enable/disable service_name

Getting information about the services

List all active services:

svcs

List all available services:

svcs -a

List all failing services:

svcs -x

to get more details on a specific failing service, use:

svcs -x service_name

to add verbosity to the svcs commands just add “-v”

the services logs are located at:
/var/svc/log
or:
/etc/svc/volatile

List all the processes this service is running, even if they have a different name:

svcs -p service_name

Viewing Dependencies

List all the services this service is depended upon, if any of these services fails, our service will fail too:

svcs -d service_name

List all the services that depend on our service, if our service fails, they will fail too:

svcs -D service_name

Service Names

the explanation for the service names im taking straight from the SUN bigadmin site:

Solaris uses a URI string called an FMRI (Fault Managed Resource Identifier) to identify system objects for which advanced fault and resource management capabilities are provided. Services managed by SMF are assigned FMRI strings prefixed with the scheme name “svc“, as shown in the following examples for the Solaris service syslogd(1M):

• svc://localhost/system/system-log:default
• svc:/system/system-log:default
• system/system-log:default

Notice that these service FMRIs used by SMF can be expressed in three ways: first as an absolute path including a location path such as “localhost“; second as a path relative to the local machine; and third as simply the service identifier with the string prefixes implied. The SMF administrator tools described in the rest of this document typically describe services using the third form, as they are assumed to be operating on local services. Other management tools that operate on multiple types of resources or across machine boundaries may use one of the other forms to describe services. The SMF tools in the current release of Solaris can only manage services on the local host.

Solaris RunLevel

There are no longer run levels setting on the Solaris server, now this is called milestones.
Milestones are a group of services, which defines a state the server is in – just like single user, or multi user.
you can bring the server into a specific milestone with:

svcadm milestone milestone/single-user:default

to permanently set the server in a specific mile stone , use:

svcadm milestone -d milestone/single-user:default

and again – to list what services should be running to reach a specific milestone, use:

svcs -d milestone_name

and that’s the short explanation

next time ill explain how to add a service of your own to the system.

xkcd cartoons got me at least twice that i can think of,
I’m hearing a lot these days about uptime, and this cartoon just hits the spot:

devotion to duty

and another one that i went around with for months, couldn’t get it out of my head:

exploits of a mom

Technorati Tags: books, funny

Network File System (NFS) is a network file system protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems in 1984, allowing a user on a client computer to access files over a network in a manner similar to how local storage is accessed.

So basically its a network share, it allows you to share files between remote computers
in the most easy and seamless way, once it was specifically for UNIX servers,
but today NFS is supported over MS servers as well.

Like everything else in Sysadmin life,
when its working its working well, and nobody hears about it,
but what to do when its not working?
Samba debugging for example is easier from that aspect since it has extensive logs for the sysadmin,
NFS doesn’t keep logs, and NFS issues doesn’t show up in the syslog/messages file as well.

But there are tools that allow you to get extensive information about the running NFS process,
shares, statistics, users connected etc :

Technorati Tags: Command line, NFS, samba, Solaris

Starting from the begining:

what is mediawiki?

MediaWiki is free server-based software which is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It’s designed to be run on a large server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day. MediaWiki is an extremely powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation, that uses PHP to process and display data stored in its MySQL database.
Media wiki site

Media wiki also saves the versions of the updated files – allowing for easy reverts and versioning of edited files.

The largest sites using medaiwiki:

Design matters

Wiki website doesn’t have to have the MediaWiki standard look,
you can design the look and feel either manually to suite the corporate guidelines or with existing skins.

Novelle’s wiki site:

marvel.wikia.com:

Extensions

Extensions are compilations of PHP code that add new features or enhance functionality of the main MediaWiki core. Extensions are one of the main advantages of MediaWiki. They give wiki administrators and wiki end-users the ability to adapt MediaWiki to their requirements.

The extensions can add capabilities like:

• Embed videos (YouTube)
• WhosOnline – shows you who is currently logged in to your wiki
• Allow embedded flash
• Iframe – to load pages from other site in your wiki page
• Convert to pdf
• Images preview popup window

Integrate into the Organization

• Email address
• Real name
• Nickname
• Language

First steps with editing wiki pages

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_Editing_overview

This simple editing tutorial will show you the basic step in editing a new wiki page:

• headings
• lists
• links

Technorati Tags: Linux, mediawiki, php, wiki

VNC is a server client method of connecting to a remote server,
the great thing about vnc is that you can see the remote server desktop, and work on it with a mouse just like its your local desktop.
another good thing about vnc is that its free for use for many distros.

There are main 2 major software companies that supply free vnc server and vnc cllient,
the first is realvnc and the second is tightvnc , from the tighvnc site:

TightVNC is a free remote control software package. With TightVNC, you can see the desktop of a remote machine and control it with your local mouse and keyboard, just like you would do it sitting in the front of that computer. TightVNC is:

• free for both personal and commercial usage, with full source code available (GPL-licensed);
• useful in remote administration, remote customer support, education, and for many other purposes;
• cross-platform, available for Windows and Unix, compatible with other VNC software.

So these are 2 options for you to download a good free vnc viewer.

Solaris VNCserver configuration

and I say only viewer because now the Solaris 10 build 5 comes with the vncserver alredy inside.
all you need to do is to configure it.

This page on the SUN site will give you the detailed explanation on how to do things and what security patch you need to install fisrt ,but the instructions can be summed up in 4 lines:

mkdir -p /etc/dt/config

cp /usr/dt/config/Xservers    /etc/dt/config/Xservers

edit this file “/etc/dt/config/Xservers” and add these lines at the end:

:1  Local local_uid@none root /usr/X11/bin/Xvnc :1 -nobanner -AlwaysShared -SecurityTypes None -geometry 1024x768x24 -depth 24
:2  Local local_uid@none root /usr/X11/bin/Xvnc :2 -nobanner -AlwaysShared -SecurityTypes None -geometry 1024x768x24 -depth 24
:3  Local local_uid@none root /usr/X11/bin/Xvnc :3 -nobanner -AlwaysShared -SecurityTypes None -geometry 1024x768x24 -depth 24
And reboot the server.

The lines with the :1 :2 etc at the beginning, are the virtual displays you wish to server to have available for connections, you can add more by changing the numbers to :4 :5 etc.

when connecting to the server with the vnc viewer you need to express to which virtual display you want to connect by adding it to end of the server’s name or ip:

10.10.10.1:3

If you want to connect to virtual display number 3.

A security note – this configuration will allow passwordless access to the vnc screen – if someone logs in and leaves it open – the next user can just enter without a login.

A safer configuration is to require a password by using the -SecurityTypes VncAuth parameter. The Xvnc(1) man page describes password requirements.

VNC and Security

The vnc as a general is clear text, for a more secure connection there is a method of tunneling the vnc through a ssh session.
2 nice tutorials for vnc through ssh can be found here and here.
the second tutorial is using putty for the ssh connection – putty is another great freeware,
its a free ssh client for windows to connect to ssh servers.

If the server you wish to connect to through vnc is located withing your lan,
and you are relaxed about security for the users on it – if its a training server etc ,
you can just setup the vncserver without any safeguards,
but if you are connecting through an unsecured medium (AKA the internet)
you better add the ssh layer to it.

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Technorati Tags: desktop, Linux, network, Solaris, windows