 media wiki documentation server. So I did a video while back and we've been using this for a while and as we use things we always add tools, modify, change the way we're doing things. So this is a August 2017 update of how we're using the server. I was against and my employees were four using a WYSIWYG interface on top of it. So we loaded the WYSIWYG. I gotta admit I kind of like it but I still dropped to the code because I don't know I like the formatting of the Wiki markup language which just I don't know I'm more of a code guy so it's easier for me but maybe not everybody likes that. It also does have the ability to eat very easily paste spreadsheets into here which is kind of a huge factor for the way we accumulate a lot of data that we may need for example when we do an entire network scan and the results of that scan we may want to keep in a customer file well that is kind of handy to do when you're doing a long list that it makes it a lot easier with the WYSIWYG. So we're going to show you some of the modifications we've done to the system. I will talk a little bit about installing the visual editor. People have asked me about showing how to set up the media Wiki. I probably could do a video on it but the reality is the instructions are really good the only problem I ran into is the passing the cookies part and I'll throw that in there. It's really easy to do it's just the one part I missed and the reason I missed it because when most of the documentation wills Wikis are open to the public. This isn't open to the public it's not available online this is internally hosted with a self-sign certificate and then has a series of rules through the firewall because it's on a separate network that only certain computers are even allowed to get to or visibly see the machine. That being said we still require login as you can see right here in the back login required to get anywhere and we have two factor authentication put on this. So I'm going to go ahead and log in and show you the media Wiki and some of what we're doing with it some things will be blurred out because this is our production one but I didn't feel like spinning up a duplicate copy with a bunch of fake data just for the video. I'm just going to blur out the client stuff. So you can see that I can't see anything recent changes help whatever there's nothing you can get to without logging in so everything is starts with the login. Then the two factor token and now we're on the main page and we actually have our main page set up to have recent changes that were made because often if you're editing a client or actively working on it those recent changes are often you go right back into the same client go I added this I added this got a little save along the way type of things that we do. Now that's pretty easy to do and I'll show you the source for this real quick. All you have to do is add the word special pages recent changes and I put slash 50 so it gives me I think that's the last 50 recent changes that show up so that makes it really simple to give me the page with the recent change on it so I know any of the clients that have changes going on is recently done here and we're actually going to look at test page 007 but one of the things is really nice I'm going to expand this and I set up test page 007 as an example in here this wiki detail logs everything because all the logs and we change history is very well logged in wikis tells you exactly what you change you can easily go back and look at a specific change from a specific user so I know who edited anything into wiki and if they edit it and they edited wrong like you know for example if someone thought they set the password to be something new but they never actually changed it that actually had happened once the password change didn't save but they did save it into wiki no big deal just roll back roll the wiki back we can see what the previous password is it doesn't lose that information same with files if someone goes and deletes a file we can always go back and restore any of those files I don't have any purging turned on on this and I believe that's a default I don't think I had to change anything to do that it queues and makes a deleted page of files but does not have any way to purge those out other than going into the command line and actually deleting them out of the file system directly so this is what a client page would look like and all this is filled in we put a client somewhere at the top are they a part of our msp plan because we're kind of a mixed environment we don't mind having break fix clients but obviously if they're msp they're going to get more of a priority service and we also have better insights we know they're going to be in the dashboard so when they call we look them up the wiki is searchable and you can actually add it to your google toolbar at the top so when you type in wiki I can actually find the clients like test page 007 just like that it'll bring me right to the page or search from here it's all cross index and searchable and it autocompletes that's just a built-in feature of the wiki media so client summary here at the top what email do we provide them web hosting backup that's the email g-suite email is either office 65 or g-suite we actually have some clients have mixed environments because they own multiple sites and one site someone we deal with a lot of craziness we also will put in there who's managing it because we actually have a client that self manages uh because they want to they feel better in control of it we're fine with that that leads to the problem of when an employee will call us and have a problem we always have to defer back to whoever's managing it we haven't won at the office managers decided that we don't need the password to that's a whole nother discussion but we just kind of roll with how clients are now the contents page is built automatically I'll show you the source here no need to build a contents page it's just not in here that is automatically generated once you have a few headings now this lets me jump to certain headings we also as we put all the tables in have them set to collapsed and the reason for that is it just makes a cleaner look and all their passwords aren't just you know some of these get really long if they have a list of different servers so if they have hosting there's the c-panel wordpress g-suite this is all generic information in here uh there are firewalls windows servers uh and we'll repeat the server if there's multiple logins for it so we may have different admin logins in there uh printers the devices the location ip address username password for the printer um and what the device name might be now this is the solar winds or iDrive both of them uh supporters a few other backups that we're have different clients are using this is just the most common ones iDrive is when they want to manage themselves uh well we don't set it up for them but we if we can we'll track the passwords in case we ever have to restore something for them um the solar winds product i did a review of you can find it on my youtube channel that one uh when we manage it we put it all in here it makes it very easy so when we understand what each company is now that's really important because it's what's not kept in the solar winds panel or the iDrive if you're using full encryption for compliance the key you create the AES key so it's encrypted before it leaves the computer you really have to keep track of that key because if you lose that key you can't do a restore there's no way to restore directly from the dashboard without the AES key on the local machine software licenses another thing we track where they registered random things to because it seems that clients can't keep track of that at all and see we use this even for our non-managed clients because if we have information and we do a project for them we still document that project and save it that way as of you know the time we did it we have all the information and clients seem to often immediately lose all the information and this is very handy for us because we just had a client they replaced their computer the other one died they did it themselves they called us they're like we don't have quickbooks we had their quickbooks information from when we installed it a year ago it's already in here so it makes it really easy for that now we've installed a visual editor and that's the part that was a little bit tricky to install and I'll show you how it works so the visual editor as you can see nothing really seemed to change but it lets me right away start editing and inserting things now we always throw a couple pictures in there these are some random ones a couple I found on the internet and I put them in for the client but we'll actually put pictures sometimes of different things in the com room that way if they call us we can look at their com room and know what it should look like and say hey this is the box you need to reset or unplug or this light should be green if it's in what's the color of the light that little information is going to be off to the side here sometimes we have multiple photos because we have a few fast food places that we support and it's got to be visual for some of them they a lot of times they we take pictures of what's plugged in where because that's our biggest problem is they just unplug stuff so here's how you edit a table if I want to insert a blow I could just make another row just like that and add information to it and the same thing if I want to get rid of that row I can just go in here and delete row same thing for here or here or anywhere and then we go to properties and this is where you choose if it's collapsed and if it's collapsed initially so if I didn't want that table to be collapsed I do that and like this one for example we don't have it collapsed because we want it right there to summary so as we hit the client we know you know those couple little details about them and this is a general template because this is a wiki there is easily different ways we do things for different clients for example if I wanted to insert another heading right here notes for software and we could just put notes for how a software install works and that's really important because some of our clients have weird tools that they use and we have one of them we got a documentation for of the services they have to be stopped every time we load an update to their software that runs their carpet company there's a few simple steps they're not real hard to do but it's important that we have the notes in there because you got to put a couple key things that are odd so we have the notes for how that software install works so it makes it really easy just to then add those notes and you can put it we have a couple of what we've went as far as put screenshots in and by putting screenshots in it makes it really really easy so when someone else has to do that same thing later we can go reference that software and solve for that client know exactly how it's done so you do that and save changes and it confirms that you're saving it's going to log that I saved it now let's show you how a password change looks real quick so we're going to go ahead and go back to editing and we'll change this to on another oh my god spell right another password we'll just hit save save now we're going to go back to the main page well we're just going to go right to the recent changes page and we can click on it and we can see directly that password change I just made so this was the old password this zone shows it in line 22 so I can see that and if I want I can go ahead and restore it and roll back the edits really quickly so I can go back to older edits and kind of walk through the different edits we made so here's some of the stuff I did there notes for software install was changed and this makes it really nice for tracking everything that's going on at this particular client so I can have the entire history I know who did the history it tracks each user and I know the differences that were made for this client so it's very well tracked now the nice thing is with security it's all internally hosted this is all physically one virtual server in our box very locked down I have problems a little bit because just throwing it all in some third party one that third party becomes a very hot target for hackers because well everyone has a lot of documentation in the same system the second problem is that it becomes a problem that company goes down I mean hopefully they don't go down and don't have a problem but if they do you immediately end up with potential security issues for yourself you can't service your clients if they go down you don't know what happened to the data if they go down and for disclosure would they reveal if they got compromised at all you know that's another thing because it would devalue their company so there's a lot of this you know for example the Yahoo they didn't want to disclose they they were compromised because they were trying to sell the company so that's one of the reasons we hosted all internally now the last thing I show you is how the files work in this which is really simple now we had to make some modifications and at the end I'll show you the config file that we modified so you can see it the file modification is allowing it to do more than just images because that's the default now the one thing about it is the visual editor doesn't do the best job of handling non-image files so I usually when I want to add an image file you just go right here to files and edit the source and I'm going to show you I'm going to drag a file in so we're using the drag and drop tool and I'll have all the plugins that I'm using listed so we do that upload this file insert link save and there we go there's the first file there's a second file maybe we want to make it prettier so we'll put a line break between them there we go now there's the files and I could have named it something different but now I can see this file and this file and any other config files that we upload for their system these are the ones for pf sense but whatever their config files or whatever they're using whether it's unify or whatever we upload those files to here so we have a history now we can replace those files every time we update their firewall we go ahead and put a latest copy in here so we have it have their copy on file very handy keeping that in here because when we do have to replace things like a firewall we just run in here we can grab the config push the config to the firewall and when we get it out there we just plug it in so if the firewall dies the we just pull from the config that we have in our customer file and we can restore it or when someone else plays with the firewall that's not us and breaks it then we easily have a restore that's happened before too clients sometimes because they won't want passwords to things I'm not going to deny under passwords and then they play that's that's a whole another one of them just went in and to the council and reset it on thinking that was what they need to do and they cleared all the settings easy easy to solve copy this file over and restore it back to the last change so that's pretty much how it's set up now let me show you a little bit inside of what plugins were using all right so as far as the plugins go we left the default extensions that came with it in here which is site site this page gadgets uh partial functions poem and a few others rename user uh all pretty straightforward stuff the uh uploader in here is the ms upload wiki editor oauth for the two factor authentication and then the bigger extension in here the one that's a little bit trickier to load but just follow the work instructions is called the visual editor now the visual editor I have it all set up to enabled here so these are the settings for that which is nothing special uh but this is the part that's important this wg virtual rest config modules parsed forward cookies equals true you have to forward the cookies if you set up a private wiki so your login token allows the parsed server to talk to the wiki on your behalf that's an important this was the only line that was really missing for me to make it work and it's confusing because it doesn't give you an error that's easy to trace um so that was that was mine my little oversight because I it wasn't a documentation I found but it wasn't as obvious uh and what par suede's is this par suede is a module that allows uh I believe it pulls all the files uh pulls all the wiki data into the visual editor into like a java stream uh to make editing a lot easier so if you go to set that module up and you set up a private wiki like I am make sure you have this uh wg virtual rest config modules the other thing to note is I have it on 8142 if you read through the documentation that changes with what your server using we run debian therefore it's 8142 is where par suede's loads on it loads apparently on 8000 on some of the other ones I think is what I read in documentation but uh just make sure you're paying attention to the port numbers because well that's really important the other things we have is the array of files that we allowed UNF for unify cfg zip files odg and a few other things in there so text files xls so those are different things log files we sometimes zip because sometimes we'll keep a log file for something that we may want to look at later and everything else is just the default permissions for like the visual editor in here so there's a couple we just pasted in all the default settings on here which defaults to using it which is what we wanted so that's how the visual editor works now the last thing I'll show you here is actually just q he didn't change anything is pasting any spreadsheet so here's a stock tracking sheet that I was playing with inside of google docs and I can just go here and do a copy and then we're going to go and edit this page and just do a paste it's a standard wiki table now one of things I'll show you if you look at this we're going to go ahead and save the changes save and we look at the source class wiki table symbol please note it only copied the data none of the html forward adding none of the embedment anything like that so this is all just pasted right in and that's really handy because you don't want it to be the linking externally now you can link externally which is kind of cool and we've done that for a few uh systems where we want to link directly to a page um and have a change but it's kind of cool that you can do this well I can't really say have a change it just link do you can just put the links in uh but this is kind of cool so instead of embedding it doesn't support iframes that I know of uh it's not embedding the google doc it is just copying that data so if you if we have a client that has a bunch of data that we put all into a spreadsheet which of course if it's ever going to go docs in case anyone's wondering it's non confidential information it's sometimes just you know ip lists and convenience when we're there at the client then we come back here and we just paste it right into the wiki and makes it easy it also supports pasting I believe uh find from other things like excel if you use excel but pretty cool that you can do that uh another side note for those of you using screen connect uh it will do this too and this is kind of novel so if we go here I'm going over and grabbing my computer all right now I got a copy of the link directly to my computer and if you don't know this in screen connect if you filter for a computer and then copy the link at the top because it changes so right there is a link to my computer at home and then when I click it it it's in screen connect which I'm already logged in and I can get right to my computer and yes my home computer is referred to as tom lords pc because my employees thought that was funny and yes some game whatever my kid was playing is what's on there um because it's my gaming computer at home so it's kind of a novel the way you can do that and it's handy because sometimes when you're in there we link to each one of the client servers in screen connect so we can directly jump right into the server uh it still has to be logged in a screen connect but it creates a really handy quick link okay here's the server and here's a link right to the server so we can get right to the thing we need to do uh been real happy with that feature and uh it's once again it's all about servicing the client fast and the quicker you can have data at the ready and have the answers you're looking for or being able to say have a client go hey I'm having a problem with this thing jumping to that client page with the right documentation being able to get right into the server and have all the information and credentials right at your fingertips is very convenient and very scary because there's a lot of information a lot of data for a lot of clients in here which is why we are really strict about how this is accessed and that we keep it in-house and I know there's a lot of companies offering external storage for all this I'm just worried a little bit about that that's why we decided to do it all in-house so uh that's how we're using this media wiki here in 2017 of August as if we change how we use things I'll maybe I'll do another video uh question concerns and comments concerns someone told me this is an absolutely horrible way to do it but I said okay and they never really followed up and I said what's a better way and there was just dead air uh people love telling me I'm doing things wrong as I've always said if I'm doing it wrong let me know how to do it right that would be great so I can improve there are some other companies that offer internally hosted things this is the only open source one that I'm aware of and I say aware of because well there's probably something else out there I'm just not aware of there's a big world out there anyways if you like to content here like and subscribe and questions and comments leave them below thanks