Re: Apple II wiki

["Warren Ernst" <wernst@gmail.com>]

Gabriel,

Cool beans. Since you've indulged me for this long, allow me to suggest
the following:

Firstly, as far as I am concerned, this is YOUR site. You've done all
the work, are paying for the hosting, and you've paid for the domain
name. Frankly, I personally think that if you were the sole admin, and
didn't give administration rights to anyone else, that would be fine.
If you want to designate some co-admins or whatever, go for it. Its
your show. (BTW, I personally have no interest in the position.)

The wiki content will work itself out. It usually does, in my
experience. "Normal" rights to contributors should be all that's
needed.

My only beef was that there was some way to rebuild the wiki should you
fall off the face of the earth, and let's be honest, before this month,
*my* last posts to CSA2 were about 10 *years* ago, and who knows when
I'll drop out again. <g> Any one of us could lose interest for a few
years.

So about passwords and backups. My advice to you is to *not* give out
the admin password to anyone (more on this below). Furthermore, I
recommend you *not* give out the MySQL database username and password
either. These last two are only needed to set up communication between
the Wiki software and the database server, and if someone wants to
rebuild the wiki elsewhere with the database, they will set up their
own MySQL username and password on their system. In other words, giving
it away the database username/password only serves to put the wiki at
risk for vandalism and hacking. Don't do it.

Now the wiki's Admin account name and password is something that WILL
be needed for someone to rebuild the wiki. It is saved in the wiki
database itself. So here's what I recommend: JUST BEFORE doing a
database backup, change the Admin password to something like "abc123"
(or whatever). Then log out of the Wiki and do the MySQL database
backup. Link the downloadable tarball to a link in the wiki itself in a
Wiki page named something like "Database Backup File.". Then make one
more backup and make the latest backup replace the first backup. Now
change the Admin password back to what you had it as before.

In the future, just before doing the backup of the database, change the
password to something else, then make the backup, then change the PW
back to whatever you were using, and then update with Wiki Page with
"the admin password for this backup file is 'llama'. (or whatever).

This way, the backup file could always be used for rebuilding it
elsewhere, AND there won't be anyway for some yahoo to log in as the
Admin without your permission, so you'll always be in control.

Brilliant, no?

As I have plenty of hosting space and MySQL rights, I'd be happy to
test that the backup can be relocated elsewhere. I'll even write up the
procedure on a Wiki page on the Wiki itself.

Sound OK to you?

-Warr