Building a TWiki VM for production use
A few scribbled ideas on preparing / tuning and offering a TWiki vm for production use if to be downloadable from twiki.org. Maybe even supported.
Comments more than welcome.
Objectives, starting out
- Tune for Windows use
- Sensible defaults, try to lower AdminSkillsAssumptions
- Focus on environment (Apache / Linux), TWiki itself can be replaced or extended in a snap
Need to have
- Tighten Samba security, user access to file shares / network neighbourhood should be tied to OS user authentication
- Decide finally on default hostname
- HOWTO Change unix passwords - security PREREQUISITE for using vm
- HOWTO Change the hostname to your likings
- workgroup / server name in samba config
- hostname in /etc/hosts
-
hostname
- Document simple userdriven update procedures
- HOWTO Update to new TWiki version
- HOWTO Update to bugfix release
- HOWTO Install a plugin
- HOWTO enable e-mail subsystem (registration, notification, actions)
- Internationalisation
- HOWTO change L10N / I18N-setup to other languages
- Default language: en_US
- Installed locales - same as translations
Nice to have
- Run SpeedyCGI on 'view' as default. Adds problem of how to kill speedy_backends when there's updates to configuration, done e.g. via
configure
.
Possible tailored distributions
- Distribution prepared for Kerberos / Windows Active Directory Authentication, "pluggable" in typical MS environment.
- Distribution prepared for graphical plugins, seems to be a culprit for many people, getting graphic environment set up properly.
- Install graphics tools for rendering
- graphviz, htmldoc, pdfgen, imagemagick, dot, etc
- Distribution containing a full or many-as-possible set of plugins
Thoughts
- Easy to set up a TWiki for single users running Windows on LAN / intranet.
- Kind of "plug-in"-TWiki installation - "hand-over" distribution for ESA / VMware department, and it is installed in a blitz. Can choose to security review the vm, or build new one from scratch.
- Allows for condensed POC trials on TWiki setups - easy setup, easy removal, once the vm is deleted, everything else is left untouched. .. leads to stuff like:
- HowToEvaluateTWikiInYourEnterprise
- VMware installations (ESX/GSX Server) are typically done on multi-headed (dual-cpu/core or more) equipment, good for TWiki performance
--
SteffenPoulsen - 19 Jan 2006