Topic on Project:Support desk

Upgrading from 1.15 to current, with no bureaucrat or admin

6
Groomej (talkcontribs)

S.O.S. - the information in my library's Reference Desk Wiki is too valuable to lose.

I need some suggestions on the best way to go - and my tech skills have withered as I refined my librarian skills (i.e. I just barely learned java, never learned php, etc when work at *other libraries* became more specialized and the IT folks did it all). I am "new" to my place of employment and now working with our IT staff to upgrade and migrate my dept staff wiki (made by webmaster for Dept - not IT - I work in the Place of Many Silos).

We have Mediawiki 1.15 with very outdated PHP and MySQL running on an internal server with IIS 5 (according to previous staff, that was used instead of Apache - huh?). There was a lot of tweaking to make it run on the platform and she said it would be next to impossible to trace it all through upgrades.

NO bureaucrat nor Admin/SysOp user account in our MediaWiki - I don't know if the accounts were deleted when people retired - but there isn't even a generic account. I tried following earlier post about making all users Bureaucrat, but seems that our version is too old (or I really missed the boat). And to complicate matters, ports are secured (by state agency requirements) so I get errors from WAMP and AMPS when I try in a development area.

Looks like 2009 was last time anything was modified on our site - about 1 1/2 yrs before we migrated off the Novell network and a year before I was hired.

I am trying to decide if (looking for recommendations):

  1. we lose the revision history and attempt to load the backup file into a new version without going through all the steps of migration;
  2. go through the steps of upgrading PHP, MySQL and Mediaiki and risk it breaking at any step along the way;
  3. I try to cut and paste everything on browser display into a completely new version and forget about the older stuff in the underlying structure (I'm REALLY good at ctrl A; ctrl C; ctrl V; ctrl S);
  4. It was been suggested I try to run some of the text files through OpenRefine and get information into SharePoint;
  5. Contracting out to get it migrated is not an option either;
  6. purchasing software, plugins, etc only possible if inexpensive.

Any suggestions as to the best way to begin? Thanks! Jenny

Groomej (talkcontribs)

[dupe post]

Ciencia Al Poder (talkcontribs)

I'm pretty sure the createAndPromote.php script exists in 1.15, so you could run that to make a new bureaucrat account that could grant admin rights to other users.

The recommended way to upgrade, in your situation, would be to use a new server (with recent versions of PHP/mysql) and install MediaWiki from scratch (a recent version) to a new database. Feel free to test some MediaWiki extensions and if everything works. Then you could take a backup of the old database and restore it on the new server, and make the new MediaWiki version point to that database, and then run the update script to perform changes to the database to adapt to the new version. You may need to copy the images/upload folder to get your uploaded files on the new server.

Note that even if you can't for whatever reason take a backup of the database and you only want the contents of the wiki, you can export the data in XML format and import it on a new installation, as explained in Manual:Importing XML dumps.

Groomej (talkcontribs)

Thanks. I will try createAndPromote.php again. Your recommendation is just what I thought was best way.

Groomej (talkcontribs)

does it have to be a back up and not a copy? I am assuming that it true

Ciencia Al Poder (talkcontribs)

Well, AFAIK mysql needs to be back-up and restored, you can't just copy mysql files, specially if they are not the same version of Mysql

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