I inherited a MediaWiki appliance that someone has setup in Virtual Box running on a Windows Vista machine. I need to move the virtual machine to Hyper-V since we have a VM host server for our network. But, the MediaWiki device seems to be a really old version. I can't get it to update using any of the documents on this site. I tried everything I could find here http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:FAQ

When I do it through the GUI, I get the 404 error about the Debian packages.

So, can anyone point me in the right direction on updating and/or moving the VM to my Hyper-V server?

Sorry if these are noob questions, but I've had a total of about 5 hours experience with this "appliance" so far.

Thanks!

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Jeremy Davis's picture

But I don't have a lot of experience. Microsoft have made some efforts to get Linux to run, but it's not really in their interests to support their biggest competitor in the server space - hence from my understanding it's sub-optimal.

Personally what I did in a similar situation a few years ago was buy a new HDD, install Proxmox to the hardware and migrate the physical Win server into Proxmox as a KVM VM. I then offloaded as much funtionality from the Win VMs as I could to Linux VMs running under OVZ (Proxmox has much lower resource overheads than Win and Linux VMs running under OVZ are so resource friendly it's not funny). I then migrated the remaining Win VM (there was only one) to run on the PVE host. My whole system runs so much better now - even the Win server runs better as a dedicated VM now that it doesn't have to support all the other VMs. So now I only have 2 Win VMs running (the original physical server + 1) and everything else is handled by Linux VMs (mostly TKL ones). Admittedly it was a huge hassle to do at the time, but I have absolutely no regrets. It runs so much smoother and is far more scalable. Especially now that TKL is incorporated into PVE, it takes all of about 5 minutes to provision a new TKL server VM (running under OVZ).

Anyway, that may not be the answer you are after... So to answer your question more explicitly...

I would suggest that you install the TKL v12.0 MediaWiki appliance to your Hyper-V host and ensure that you can get that running ok. From what I understand it will require some tweaking but it should run ok. Once you have that set up then run TKLBAM on your old appliance and restore it into your new v12.0 appliance. You may need to do some additional tweaking there to get that all working, but hopefully shouldn't take too much effort...

Jeremy Davis's picture

Support for Hardy finishes up in about 6 months (April 2013 - with the release of Ubuntu 13.04), but the Debian components of TKL v2009.x versions (they included some pinned Debian packages) are EOL and as such so are the v2009.x versions of TKL.

The suggestion of manually migrating content is valid, but personally I'd try using TKLBAM first. Just 'apt-get install tklbam' in the old server. As long as you document the process to get v12.0 running on Hyper-V and don't destroy the current MW server until you have confirmed migration you should be fine. Although if everything doesn't work as it should OOTB then just manually migating the content would probably be easier than mucking around with it.

Thanks for the responses guys! I REALLY appreciate it!

Is TKLBAM a pay service? It seems like it is since it backs up to EC2?

I've got the most current version of TKLMW installed and running fine on my Hyper-V server. But now I'm stuck as how to migrate all my data over? TKLBAM isn't installed on the old machine and I can't update it.

 

 

EDIT: I just updated WEBMIN from the GUI and a ton of more options just showed up in the GUI. It's on WEBMIN 1.600 now.

Jeremy Davis's picture

I have read that there are some beter network drivers that will increase networking performance (but obviously I don't know for sure as I don't use it). But I'd probably just wait and see how it goes and only worry about it if performance is sub-par.

As for installing TKLBAM you should be able to do that via the commandline. Either exit out of the Confconsole on the appliance itself (ie through the VirtualBox window - quit out of the blue screen thing to the commandline) or SSH in using PuTTY (or similar). The root user and the same password as Webmin should work fine. Then run these commands:

apt-get upgrade
apt-get install tklbam

It will probably complain that it can't update all the package lists (because it can't find the Debian ones) but that's ok you should be able to ignore that warning. Otherwise you may need to comment out the Debian reference in the sources.list. I forget how v2009.x was configured but it should either be /etc/apt/sources.list or /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sources.list and from the commandline you can use nano to edit it eg:

nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sources.list

and put a hash/pound symbol (ie '#' - without the quotes) at the start of the line(s) that includes any reference to Debian. Then retry the apt-get commands above .

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