WikiNotes
Chemwiki Overview
Underlying Platform
The Chemistry Wiki runs on a virtual machine on the College ICT ESX Farm. It has a basic specification with 4GB RAM, 2 Processors, and current disk utilization of approximately 50GB
The official hostname of the VM is chemwiki.ch.ic.ac.uk, it also has a second DNS alias, wiki.ch.ic.ac.uk.
The filesystem is standard ext4 and it is build on top of an LVM2 logical volume, which allows us to perform various clever OS level disk manipulations and snapshots.
The Operating system is Oracle Linux 6.7 (a Redhat Enterprise Linux clone)
Services
The wiki is based on Mediawiki (current version 1.25.1) and uses the stock LAMP stack.
MySQL (data stored in default location /var/lib/mysql) Apache (wiki content stored in /var/www/html/wiki
PHP version 5.3.x (standard RedHat 6.x versions cloned in Oracle Linux 6.x)
The only other services that run on the VM are:
1) Foglight monitoring software (process fglam) that reports issues back to ICT Central Monitoring.
2) Parsoid server which converts between wiki text and Rich text, and works in service of the Visual Wiki Editor.
Local Groups
There is a webmaster group which has write access to the files under /var/www/html/wiki, so that apache does not need to.
The wheel group is active as the main administrator group.
Remote SSH/SCP access by default is allowed to anyone. This can be tightened using an AllowGroups option in /etc/ssh/sshd_config
Notes relating to the unique configuration and setup of this Chemistry Mediawiki instance
Wiki version and plugin info: https://chemwiki.ch.ic.ac.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Special:Version
Latex Plugin troubleshooting and testing: https://chemwiki.ch.ic.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/LatexPlugin
VisualEditor and Parsoid Test Page is here: https://wiki.ch.ic.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/TestingOfVisualEditor
LdapAuthentication plugin issues covered here: https://wiki.ch.ic.ac.uk/wiki/index.php?title=LDAPAuthentication
Disk space issues covered here: https://wiki.ch.imperial.ac.uk/wiki/index.php?title=DiskSpace