[pmwiki-users] Secondary wiki / backup wiki?

Kathryn Andersen kat_lists at katspace.homelinux.org
Mon Mar 12 05:49:29 CDT 2007


On Mon, Mar 12, 2007 at 11:07:19AM +0100, christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com wrote:
> The wiki I'm working with (wiki.lyx.org) suffered a problem for a week 
> because the host machine was down. In this situation it would have been 
> good to have been able refer people to a secondary wiki, or a backup wiki.
> 
> Has anyone tried to implement or use something like this?
> 
> I'm thinking of a system that quickly lets you set up the wiki on a second 
> machine, accept changes and then transfer these changes back to the 
> original machine when it gets back up again.

If you could ensure that the backup machine only had editing enabled (or
was only visible) when the main machine went down, then it could be done
by using something like rsync or unison to copy files between the machines.
Since PmWiki is file-based, one could simply copy the pmwiki directory
(including wiki.d etc) from the "master" machine to the "slave" machine,
once you had the slave machine set up to actually run the wiki.

I do something similar, by copying files back and forth between my
laptop and my desktop, so that I can work on wiki stuff when I'm
travelling.  But in that case, since I'm the only one doing editing on
the wiki, I can make sure that I do the editing on one machine or the
other machine, and then sync them (with unison).

If someone edited a page on both machines, though, then you would have
conflict, because you wouldn't know which version to use, and you'd
probably lose one set of changes.  This wouldn't be a problem in the
scenario you're describing, where one machine is down and the other
machine wouldn't be active until the first machine was down.

As for automating synchronisation of "slave" to "master", that's not so
easy.  I don't know if one could do anything to make them sync every
time there was a change; the best thing I can think of would be a
periodic cron job, which would copy the master data to the slave
regularly (hourly?  daily?)

At least that would be better than nothing.

Kathryn Andersen
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