GNHLUG> Main Web>LocalTWikiDocs>AdminLog (2023-12-26, BenScott) EditAttach
This is the administrative journal/log/record for the TWiki site. Significant changes, site-wide changes, and/or things that won't show up in a TWiki page edit history somewhere, should be documented here. See also TWikiMods for a current-state (as opposed to chronological) view of things.

It is in Main Web simply so we do not have to put Main. in front of every WikiName.

BruceDawson - 02 Oct 2005

Just protected TWiki.cfg from web browsing - this was recommended by the TWiki core team. This required changing Apache's httpd.conf for the gnhlug.org site.

BruceDawson - 15 Oct 2005

I changed templates/mailnotify.tmpl to not have HTML in it. This substantailly reduces the content of the message, but I think that's what people want anyway.

BenScott - 2023 Dec 11

Upgrade TWiki from release 3.x dated 2004 September 01 (Cairo?) to 6.1 (2018-07-16). Also move to a new server, was justice, now petra. First significant upgrade to our TWiki software in almost two decades. (Not something to be proud of.)

This was a clean install. The GNHLUG and Org Webs had their content migrated over (data and pub), but other Webs were created anew. The old install had a ton of spam accounts, mostly neutered, but still cluttering things up. And I judged it easier/better to start fresh than try to figure out what should be kept in webs like Main and TWiki. This does mean users have to create new accounts again, but that is very easy to do, and if one uses the same name, all the history links even keep working.

  • installed TWiki 6.1 from tarball from the twiki.org website
  • created group gnhlugweb
  • installing packages needed by TWiki
  • these per TWikiSystemRequirements#Optional
    • libcgi-session-perl for CGI::Session
      • libmldbm-perl as suggested by libcgi-session-perl
    • libcrypt-smime-perl for Crypt::SMIME
    • libcryptx-perl for Digest::SHA1
    • libjson-perl for JSON
    • liblocale-maketext-lexicon-perl for Locale::Maketext::Lexicon

  • unpacked TWiki 6.1.0 kit to /srv/web/gnhlug/twiki6
  • cd /srv/web/gnhlug/twiki6/bin
  • cp LocalLib.cfg.txt LocalLib.cfg
  • edit LocalLib.cfg
    • $twikiLibPath = "/srv/web/gnhlug/twiki6/lib";
    • stripped comments and examples
  • used TWiki website config file generator to create an Apache config
  • used that as a starting point to create
    • /etc/apache2/sites/gnhlug-twiki6.conf
    • /etc/apache2/sites/gnhlug-twiki6.inc
  • restarted Apache
  • the configure script produces a page but complaints of permissions (valid)

BenScott - 2023 Dec 12

  • created /srv/web/gnhlug/twiki6/webroot/ for the DocumentRoot
  • put a placeholder index.html there

  • created /srv/web/gnhlug/twiki6/doc/ and moved the top-level doc files there

  • shim'ed my /etc/hosts to use new server as if it were live

  • cd /srv/web/gnhlug/twiki6
  • mkdir log
  • chown -R www-data:www-data working pub data log
  • touch lib/LocalSite.cfg
  • chown www-data:www-data lib/LocalSite.cfg
  • chmod g+w lib/LocalSite.cfg

  • chmod a-rx /srv/web/gnhlug/twiki6/bin/configure
    • now the do/configure URL yields HTTP 500 Internal Error
  • chown bscott:gnhlugweb /srv/web/gnhlug/twiki6/lib/LocalSite.cfg
  • chmod -R o-rwx /srv/web/gnhlug/twiki6/tools

BenScott 2023 Dec 15

  • $TWiki::cfg{Stats}{TopicPerYear} = 1;
    • otherwise the single stats page gets very slow with years of history
  • $TWiki::cfg{Stats}{DisableInvocationFromBrowser} = 1;
    • not needed if cron is working, and potential security exposure

BenScott 2023 Dec 16

  • mv bin/.htaccess.txt doc/bin-htaccess.txt
  • mv bin/configure mv bin/configure.renamed
    • still kept it chmod 000
  • create a new "dummy" bin/configure
    • a small shell script to nicely tell people to go away
  • MimeTypesFileName = '/etc/mime.types'

I set up Apache to require authentication for the register script. This was (intended to be) done outside of TWiki, as a separate process, with Apache using HTTP Basic authentication to get credentials. It worked fine on the Apache side, but TWiki was picking up the HTTP Basic Auth username "register" from Apache via the REMOTE_USER environment variable, and treating that as a TWiki user (despite the lack of user Topic page). I found others with similar problems at https://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/UnregisteredUsersShouldBeTWikiGuests but no built-in way to handle it. My fix was to modify lib/TWiki.pm and insert at the top $ENV{REMOTE_USER} = undef; so that REMOTE_USER is always removed from the environment for every TWiki script. This seems to have worked.

BenScott 2023 Dec 17

disabled all plugins as part of debugging OOM

2023-12-17 11:28:15 enabled Apache 2 module suexec

2023-12-17 14:20:13 added some robots to Apache blacklist

BenScott 2023 Dec 19

Still getting OOM crashes. It looks like a single random IP address in the AWS cloud is spidering the entire site as fast it can, and so we get tons of Perl view processes running sucking up all the RAM. Tried adding MemoryHigh=70% and MemoryMax=90% to /etc/systemd/system/apache2.service but all that is going to do is make sure it's Apache that crashes and not something else. What we really need is a way to limit running CGI process count that doesn't break everything instantly.

18:30 Re-enabled plugins TinyMCEPlugin and WysiwygPlugin

Edited TWikiPreferences to turn the link to SmiliesPlugin into static text. Otherwise spiders try to follow the link and cause log spew since that plugin is disabled. To edit the nominally read-only page, manually type in the URL of the edit action.

BenScott - 2023 Dec 19

Added rdiff to AuthScripts in LocalSite.cfg per TWiki.org - How to run TWiki reliably on a public website

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Topic revision: r10 - 2023-12-26 - BenScott
 

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