How to create a wiki?

[CougTek]

For now, almost every setup and how-to stuff is stored uniquely in the heads of my co-worker and myself, regarding the company's servers and networking configuration. I want to create some documentation, so that if I leave, my replacement will at least know the basics. I'd like to create a wiki, accessible in the the company's intranet. I don't really care about the OS. I would prefer Linux or Open Indiana as both are free and I'm relatively familiar with those. The wiki will be in a VM.

It's supposed to be simple to do. I just don't know how to put one in place. Would any LAMP server do?

 

[ddrueding]

I can't help you, but would love a copy of the VM when you are done

 

[timwhit]

You could use one of the many turnkey appliances out there such as the ones on this list.

 

[Chewy509]

I've installed mediawiki (the wiki engine that wikipedia uses) a few times...

Basic installation guide: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installation_guide

Some Linux distro's even have it as a native package, so it's as simple as "apt-get install mediawiki". eg : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MediaWiki

 

[Chewy509]

I've installed mediawiki (the wiki engine that wikipedia uses) a few times...

Basic installation guide: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installation_guide

Some Linux distro's even have it as a native package, so it's as simple as "apt-get install mediawiki". eg : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MediaWiki

 

[Handruin]

I highly (highly) recommend paying for Confluence wiki from atlassian if you can get your management to spend for it. I've setup, managed, and used numerous types of internal wikis including mediawiki for IT and software development. The Confluence wiki is the only one so far where I don't want to poke my eyes out trying to document my work, process, infrastructure, etc. Don't overlook it's usability vs some of the barebones of mediawiki.

https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence
(if you plan to have 10 users or less it's very cheap)

Yes, you can get free wikis. You can use what Timwhit suggested to get you going ASAP and minimal hassle. I personally have tried Turnkey Linux for various appliances like Jenkins and I've also tried an handful from Bitnami such as Owncloud.

Here is a mediawiki appliance from Turnkey:
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/mediawiki

Here is the same thing from Bitnami:
http://bitnami.com/stack/mediawiki

 

[timwhit]

I've also used Confluence for several clients over the last couple of years. It's pretty nice wiki software.

Setting up a hosted account is very easy. You can also buy a license and run it internally, but this is a whole lot more work.

 

[CougTek]

Wow, thanks for all the suggestions. I'll try some tomorrow. There's no way my employer will want to pay for this though. One of the programmers told me he would do something with Sharepoint that I could use. I know pretty much nothing about Sharepoint, but being a Microsoft product, I'm sure it isn't free.

 

[Chewy509]

Sharepoint is nice (and I use that term very, very loosely) if you are a 100% windows/office environment. But it certainly breaks down if you run a mixed environment, (eg Win, Mac and Lin).

The one thing to note with Sharepoint, is that it requires MS SQL server which will add $$$ to it's own TCO.

If you already have Sharepoint setup and working in other areas of the business, by all means try it... but I would think twice if it would be a new deployment over other wiki engines.

 

[Mercutio]

I was JUST going to say that setting up a Sharepoint-based wiki is ridiculously straightforward if you already have the ingredients (Sharepoint 2010, basically) on hand.

 

[timwhit]

I loathe SharePoint.

 

[Mercutio]

That's a good-sense reaction to a piss poor product, but if it already exists in his organization it's probably the path of least resistance.
Be glad you've never had to fix a broken one.

 

[Handruin]

That's a good-sense reaction to a piss poor product, but if it already exists in his organization it's probably the path of least resistance.
Be glad you've never had to fix a broken one.

Would you rate it even easier than deploying a Turnkey Linux VM of wikimedia? I had one up and running in a short amount of time.

 

[timwhit]

Would you rate it even easier than deploying a Turnkey Linux VM of wikimedia? I had one up and running in a short amount of time.

For a free option, I think this is the best idea.

 

[Chewy509]

Be glad you've never had to fix a broken one.

I've only ever done it twice, and the last time was a complete reinstallation of Windows + SQL Server and then restoring the SQL server DBs... (plus some fudging the in the registry)... A good way to blow away a few days...

 

[Mercutio]

I've only ever done it twice, and the last time was a complete reinstallation of Windows + SQL Server and then restoring the SQL server DBs... (plus some fudging the in the registry)... A good way to blow away a few days...

... and that's not even getting in to the special layers of .NET dependency hell.

Basically the repair instructions boil down to "Make sure you install every single dependent Sharepoint Component, plus all the updates and THEIR dependencies, in exactly the same order they were installed in the first place and then pray to tits that your database backups are worth a crap."

 

[CougTek]

Wow, thanks for all the suggestions. I'll try some tomorrow. There's no way my employer will want to pay for this though. One of the programmers told me he would do something with Sharepoint that I could use. I know pretty much nothing about Sharepoint, but being a Microsoft product, I'm sure it isn't free.

Apparently, it's possible to operate a free Sharepoint wiki. Both Sharepoint Foundation and MS SQL Server Express (hold a DB up to 10GB) are free products.

I'll still try turnkey latter on.

We are an almost exclusive Microsoft place. The only person here thinking about installing stuff in Linux is me.

 

[Handruin]

We are an almost exclusive Microsoft place. The only person here thinking about installing stuff in Linux is me.

FTFY

 

[CougTek]

 

[Tannin]

Coug, MediaWiki is by far the most powerful wiki software around, but it is designed and optimised for a single big, professionally managed project. The design and especially the documentation is spotty - just fine in some cases, even excellent here and there, and absobloodylutely awful in others. Another 5-10 years will knock the remaining rough edges off it, but there are still plenty. It can be needlessly difficult to set up and administer, particularly if you want to do anything even slightly different from the default looks-and-acts-exactly-like-every-other-MediaWiki-installation, and rapidly becomes horribly time-consuming if you want to do your own thing. Simple stuff like just switching to a dark page background, for example, will take you several days of work and require pretty decent php skills in order to re-write sections of several different modules of the source code. I can't recommend something right for you (presumably the lads above are on the money) but MediaWiki is almost certainly wrong for you.

 

[CougTek]

Thanks for the advices. I won't touch this before Saturday's evening. For now, the one made with Sharepoint will be ok. It's not quite as simple to use as the one I had at my previous work place (I wasn't the one who set it up and I don't know what he used), but as a free solution already in place, it's ok.

Thinking about it, unless I stumble on a show breaker, it might not be a good idea to mess around another wiki tool, or at least not to implement another type of wiki at work. Why? Standardization. I bitched about the complexity and the too many systems used at my previous work. I don't want to repeat that here. If Sharepoint works and that our people are more familiar with it, it wouldn't be a good idea to complicate things by throwing a solution of my own that no one else will understand how works. Sure, if I'd do that for years and with various parts of the system, that would effectively make me irreplaceable, but that's not my goal. I want a simple, secured and easy to manage system...for anyone.

I'll still try Turnkey, but for my own knowledge. I might set one up at home for stuff I don't do often. Just in case I start losing memory.

 

[Handruin]

Another suggestion is to try using Microsoft OneNote since you mentioned it being a Microsoft shop. We've used it in our team and kept the notebook on a shared drive so everyone can access it. It's a decent tool for free formed documentation but lacks the support of being viewed from a web browser. The advantage is it requires minimal to no administration because there is no service to maintain...just the file share and its backups.

 

[Tannin]

BTW, most wiki software packages run just fine under Windows, you don't need to go LAMP

 

[Howell]

I use a combination of Sharepoint (for documetation) and SVN (for code/configs). I don't manage either though. Btw, I've not been able to get the file versioning to work in SP as well as SVN.