Upgrading Mediawiki

There was an announcement of a security update to mediawiki, so I upgraded. Here are the steps that worked for me, based on the directions at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Upgrading_MediaWiki.

Download the latest version:

# cd /tmp
# wget http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.13/mediawiki-1.13.2.tar.gz

Stop Apache:

# /etc/init.d/apache2 stop

Backup the database:

# mysqldump --all-databases --xml -p > db-backup.xml
Enter password:
root@web-server:~# ls -l db-backup.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6008760 2008-10-03 06:34 db-backup.xml

Backup my current wiki directory:

# cd /var/www
# tar cvfz wiki-backup.tar.gz wiki/

Installed the new software:

# tar xvfz /tmp/mediawiki-1.13.2.tar.gz -C wiki/ --strip-components=1

I didn't have AdminSettings.php, so I created that, setting values for wgDBadminuser and wgDBadminpassword:

# cd wiki
# cp AdminSettings.sample AdminSettings.php
# vi AdminSettings.php

Ran update.php:

# cd maintenance/
# php update.php
MediaWiki 1.13.2 Updater

Going to run database updates for wikidb-mw_
Depending on the size of your database this may take a while!
Abort with control-c in the next five seconds...0
...have ipb_id field in ipblocks table.
...snip...
Deleting old default messages (this may take a long time!)...Done
Checking site_stats row...ok.
Purging caches...done.
Done.

Restart Apache:

# /etc/init.d/apache2 start
* Starting web server apache2
...done.

And fired up a web browser and tested. Everything looked good.

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.

Installing MediaWiki on Ubuntu

1. Start by installing MySQL.
1. I had to use the directions here to set the root password for the mysql DB. Specifically the directions at the bottom of the page for a forgotten root password.
   
2. Follow the directions at the following URL to install and configure MediaWiki: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Running_MediaWiki_on_Ubuntu_GNU/Linux
1. Note that the current version of MediaWiki has different paths that what are given at the URL