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A client at CiviHosting who runs MediaWiki recently ran into errors with VisualEditor. We then discovered this error in their error log: [23-Dec-2019 04:13:48 Europe/Sofia] PHP Warning: fopen(/tmp/mw-UIDGenerator-UUID-128): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/username/www/www/includes/utils/UIDGenerator.php on line 445 out of the blue. We fixed this issue by manually defining this variable: $wgTmpDirectory = ‘/home/username/private’; We are always here to help.

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The team at HostingAdvice has featured CiviHosting in a new article called CiviHosting: Reliable Shared and Virtual Server Solutions Backed by Stellar Customer Support from a Family-Like Team. One quote from the Contributing Editor Christine Preusler that we liked is: CiviHosting delivers shared and VPS hosting solutions built to keep sites secure and running quickly. With a focus on delivering peace of mind through exemplary customer support, CiviHosting aims to further its reputation as a trusted and experienced host. See the full article for more details.

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This week our pro-active monitoring systems (automated and human) found two issues on client sites. We alerted them and are helping them to fix the issues. The first was one was using a vulnerable version of the IgniteUp WordPress plugin. The second was a client with Drupal 8 had a vulnerable version of PHPUnit. This vulnerability is number CVE-2017-9841 in the National Vulnerability Database. We are always on the lookout to take care of our clients and their sites, and security is a priority.

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On CiviHosting, it’s very easy. First step is to install MediaWiki. See our page How to Install MediaWiki for details on that. Second step is to run these commands from the command line: mkdir -p ./extensions/SemanticMediaWiki chmod ugo+rw ./extensions/SemanticMediaWiki composer require mediawiki/semantic-media-wiki “3.0.0” –update-no-dev composer require mediawiki/semantic-result-formats “3.0.0” composer update –no-dev Third step is to add enableSemantics( ‘example.org’ ); to your LocalSettings.php and change that “example.org” to your URL. Then just run this: php71.cli maintenance/update.php to finish. That’s it. 🙂

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CiviHosting has been featured in “Industry Leaders” section of the Website Planet blog. See here: CiviHosting Interview for the full post. We thank the Website Planet for their recognition of CiviHosting. 🙂

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We have been asked more frequently recently about migrating wiki owners from Referata to our servers. Referata runs Semantic MediaWiki, but as of this writing in October 2019, they are using MediaWiki version 1.25.5 which was released March 4, 2016, meaning it’s very old and has known security issues. Our servers run the latest stable version of MediaWiki and all installs are private installs, not farms, so you can upgrade your wiki software whenever you want, or you can ask us to do that for you. Don’t settle for ancient wiki software — we can migrate your site for you to a modern install.

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MediaWiki works fine on shared hosting, but there is (at least) on catch. When uploading files, MediaWiki, by default, saves a lock file in the /tmp folder without randomizing the file name. This will cause a conflict with multiple installations on the same server. As a solution, we you must add the following line to the LocalSettings.php file: $wgTmpDirectory = ‘/home/UserName/private/tmp’; where UserName is the Linux username of your account (on CiviHosting servers, this is the main Control Panel login as well). Then the upload wizard works fine.

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All of our servers have ImageMagick installed, as well as the GD image library for PHP. However if you set $wgUseImageMagick = true; on our servers, MediaWiki will try to adjust the server settings before it uses ImageMagick and then image operations, such as thumbnail creation, will fail, because our servers do not allow that (for good reasons). Thus we recommend you leave that set to false and then MediaWiki will use the GD library which will be as effective as ImageMagick in almost all situations.

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If you want to use a foreign SMTP server on your CiviHosting account, you must open the required ports. You can do that via your hosting Control Panel -> Mail Manager -> Foreign SMTP Servers.

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As of August 2019, WordPress sites on CiviHosting are starting to display a message: PHP Update Reqquired WordPress has detected that your site is running on an insecure version of PHP. What is PHP and how does it affect my site? PHP is the programming language we use to build and maintain WordPress. Newer versions of PHP are both faster and more secure, so updating will have a positive effect on your site’s performance. This is because on the Get a faster, more secure website: update your PHP today page, WordPress has announced that users of older versions of PHP, while still supported, will now see a message to upgrade.… Read More

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