Wiki Maintenance Cheatsheet

Todo

The instructions for new TAs ought to be moved to their own page.

• Steps to take for new TAs:

  • Ask the TA to log into the wiki to automatically create their MediaWiki account. You should then visit Special:UserRights and add them to the administrator, bureaucrat, and grader user groups.

  • Instruct the TA to replace the contents of their personal page (accessed by clicking their name in the top-right corner while logged in) with the following (they should ignore the warning intended for students):

    {{instructor links}}
    

  • Ask the TA to log into the Django site by visiting any survey to automatically create their Django account. You should then visit the Django user admin page and grant them the Staff status and Superuser status permissions.

  • Update the biol300@case.edu mailing list subscribers:

    https://groups.google.com/a/case.edu/forum/#!managemembers/biol300/members/active

  • Update the instructor and office hours listing on the Course policies page:

    https://biol300.case.edu/wiki/Course_policies

• Some useful commands:

  • Logging in, with port forwarding:

    ssh -p 8015 hjc@dynamicshjc.case.edu
    

  • Logging in, with bridged networking:

    ssh hjc@biol300.case.edu
    

  • Copying files from your local machine to your home folder on the server, with port forwarding:

    scp -P 8015 /path/to/local/files hjc@dynamicshjc.case.edu:
    

  • Copying files from your local machine to your home folder on the server, with bridged networking:

    scp /path/to/local/files hjc@biol300.case.edu:
    

  • Testing Django code as non-staff (do not forget to undo when done with is_staff=1!):

    mysql -u root -p djangodb
    UPDATE auth_user SET is_staff=0 WHERE username='hjc';
    

  • Emptying the ScholasticGrading grade log (useful for development):

    echo "DELETE FROM logging WHERE log_type='grades';" | mysql -u root -p wikidb
    

  • Viewing APT package descriptions:

    apt-cache search foo
    

  • Cleaning up directories:

    find . -name \*.pyc -exec rm \{\} \;
    find . -name \*~ -exec rm \{\} \;
    

• Important file locations:

  Apache error and access logs	/var/log/apache2/
  Apache configuration directory	/etc/apache2/
  Apache configuration files	/etc/apache2/conf-available/
  SSL certificates	/media/sf_ssl-certificates/
  Web root directory	/var/www/html/
  MediaWiki source directory	/var/www/mediawiki/
  MediaWiki extensions directory	/var/www/mediawiki/extensions/
  MediaWiki configuration file	/var/www/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php
  Django directory	/var/www/django/