Re: is there need for a wiki for the lisa?

simon wrote:
> On 15-mei-2007, at 17:15, Ray Arachelian wrote:
>
> and what is the use of spam or farmers. no interesting people for
> them, or are they planning of porting google earth to the lisa ;-)
> making a page is not a one klick act. first you go to a page where
> you want the link to appear, then click edit, make the special
> wikiword, click save. follow the just created link to the now virgin
> page and add usefull info. way to much hassle to do for someone who
> wants to attrackt millions.
>

I'm not sure what motivates them or why they do it, but the fact is that there are people out there who are utter scum. So, it's best to have a plan of dealing with them ahead of time. To me, that means a wiki that requires a login at least for edits.

Be aware that there are exploits for various browsers out there that can be invoked by visiting malicious sites. On an open system it's very easy for anyone to add links to such pages. Not every browser has these problems, but then again, not every operating system is susceptible to malware either. :-) I think that's a discussion for a different mailing list.

I've been playing around with some wiki software, and I like wxWikiServer so far. Even though it wants to run as root, it's possible to run it as a normal user on a non root port. I've not tried it on the target server machine, although under OS X, it did throw a bus error occasionally when it wasn't able to find a page, so I'll need to be careful auditing what it does.

So likely if I go with this, I'll compile it statically and run it chrooted with no permissions to access anything but its own files, and I'll build some monitoring around it to look for various problems/attacks...

I do need to replace the physical server running lisa.sunder.net before running a wiki on it as it's still a bit crippled, so all this will take a bit of time. I'd say about a month or so. (My first priority is the next release of the emulator.)

A few others that I looked at were java based with a SQL back end, those are a possibility as well. SnipSnap which is a Bliki (blog + wiki) seems interesting, so that's another option, though it's going to be a lot heavier. If you guys have other suggestions as to good wiki software to run, please feel free to email them offlist. (Make sure you include lisaem in the subj of the email so that it doesn't accidentally wind up in the spam folders.)

BTW: The LisaFAQ is actually built via didiwiki which is a very small personal wiki. Of course didiwiki isn't publicly accessible - what you guys see are just static pages built from a bunch of scripts that screen scrape it. :-) Received on 2007-05-24 11:44:11