Securing Mediawiki

I noticed that mediawiki was allowing anonymous editing of pages. I wanted to lock it down so that only those I grant accounts to could edit it.

I found the directions here. Which work for the most part, with some tweaks...

I started by restricting the wiki so that users had to be logged in to edit. That went fine.

Then I wanted to give myself sysop privileges. This was more complicated. The big issue is that when I installed mediawiki, I specified a prefix for my mediawiki tables:

$ grep wgDBprefix /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php
$wgDBprefix = "mw_";

So I had to prefiex "mw_" to all the table names on the page. The specific steps were:

1. First, I had to figure out what version of mediawiki I was running. Fortunately there is a Special:Version page that tells you that.
2. Now I need to figure out my uid for the 1.4 comments. the best way I found to do that was to log into the mysql database and then issued the following command. From the output I was able to figure out my uid was '2'.
   

   mysql> SELECT user_id, user_name from mw_user;
   

3. Now I could issue the command on the page:
   

   mysql> UPDATE mw_user_rights SET ur_rights="bureaucrat,sysop" WHERE ur_user=2;
   Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
   Rows matched: 1 Changed: 1 Warnings: 0

That did it. I didn't even have to log out and back into the wiki.