 All right media wiki.org. So if you're not familiar with media wiki, it's essentially the same software that runs Wikipedia itself Wikipedia's got a lot more customization, but the concept is the same. It's a wiki It's very easy to learn very easy to use the markup language in it And once you add a couple tools to it, it actually becomes a very great documentation server It's well part of the problem documentation is if you don't make it easy to use or you create too many Barriers and getting information both into a system or back out to people that people don't do it And that's one of the concepts in media wiki that I really liked is it becomes a very simple way to create data and Put all the data in one place and then easily change that data as needed and keep track of all the versions And who did what in that data that is a massive undertaking and Wikipedia scales really really well and has done a great job of handling that now This is the current version that we're running here in April of 2017 or 2018, which is the 1.3.0 Media wiki the 1.3.1 is supposed to be out in June But everything's gonna be based around that now part of the reason I delayed doing this video was until I had a VM ready for you And I say that because there's a lot of tricks of setting it up And I wanted to make it a little bit easier so you can just jump in and start playing with it So I'm gonna provide you a VM and a VM is specced out like this. It's called the wiki It's set to DHCP. It's got one gig of RAM 256 gig virtual hard drive It's gonna be your standard OVA format so you can import it to virtual box or whatever hypervisor you want I said virtual box because I'm actually exporting out of that because I figured that's the most common one But it works fine. You can import it into Zen or whichever other hypervisor you want to try it with Root password 123 it will allow SSH login from root because I have that turned on So those are things you may want to lock down if you plan to use this any type of secure environment The way we run ours very locked down. None of these services are exposed It's on a separate network and we're gonna cover a little bit more of the lockdown and it's the second here Something else for ease of use for people who like I said want to get started playing I loaded webman on this and if you're not familiar with webman, you're gonna find it on Port 10,000 so because it sets a DHCP the IP address picked up was that 47 you can log in and type IP ADDR and it's gonna tell you what IP address it got now Like I said root and password 123 now for the users on here. We have an admin user in the wiki and the password is password and then we have a Tom user and I made the password Tom is 123 So those are all the users that are in here pretty straightforward pretty simple zoom these in so we can read them real quick But they'll be in the little bit of instructions in the download link for this So that way you can download this file get playing with it load this in your own VM and start playing with the wiki It's pretty cool and webman. I know some people hate it I we don't use it in production But it's kind of an easy way for you to play around and poke around with the servers and a my sequel database server That's in here so you can kind of see it. I guess it's a great I think it's a great learning tool for some things or occasionally just to figure out, you know How some of the stuff works, please note it says two package updates available Do not use webman because it will break the package updater Because there's a couple caveats here The visual editor is what a lot of people want installed because it makes editing the wiki really easy the visual editor relies on Parsoid Parsoid has a new version and normally that's exciting But the part so it version is not compatible with the wiki visual editor version Needed to run on version 1.3 So there's some incompatibilities because of the new updates that being said there's a workaround where you pin the parsoid version to an old version They have instructions on how to do that. I believe it's in the discussion here So when you're following through all this if you want to build this yourself There's a lot of details that you have to kind of read and assemble There's not really any guide for putting together and it's actually rather difficult Unless you're savvy at Linux went together and I did not have time to make an entire step-by-step guide video on how to build it I mean all this is going to change in a couple months. Anyways, maybe after a change to the new version I'll look at doing that for now. I provide you with a VM that works That's and you can reverse engineer anything you want from the VM that works or just use it and customize it yourself That being said Let's get started on how the media wiki itself works like said all these I'll leave links But I mean it's tons of documentation on here and discussion of how to set all this up If you're a Linux savvy you can follow and build it on your own VM So first thing is we customize this to be a private wiki. That's one of the things about this It's not just wide open to the public and that's important because even though we keep it on a separate network We do not expose this to the internet It's locked down turned off and not easily available or easily accessible and when it is a login We have two-factor turned on so the two-factor keeps anyone from just logging in even if they did have username a password We also built it on encrypted drives This VM was not built on crypto drive basically for your convenience that way There's not one more barrier to setting it up But I highly recommend building the VMs on encrypted drives and locking it down in a separate network If you plan to put any private data in this wikis are made for sharing You just may not want to share it with everybody So we have an ACL list that only allows specific computers in this building to access it Once that's past the ACL list its username password and then a token a two-factor token and we have persistent login turned off So once they close their browser it deletes the it will not let them stay logged in so it forces them to be logged out Couple other plugins we have let's cover them real quick here We have the Oauth extension that's the two-factor one and user page viewer and visual editor and you can see all the little Customizations for visual editor that are in here. We also have a WG file extensions. This allows you to save more than just images into the wiki Which by default only once will allow images to be saved. They don't allow XML files and things like that We modified this so it allows it to do config files So if you back up a firewall and you want to save your data from a firewall configure Whatever into the wiki you can do that and I'll show you how that works as well. It's it's actually very convenient All right, so let's get that out of the way Folks really want to do is log in and it's not going to present me with two-factor because I don't have turned on for there But it's super easy to do. So here's the main page like I said very little here You can look at recent changes, which I uploaded some Stuff and played with a few things the wiki is wonderful at tracking all the details of what happened. So I Take a look and we'll start with a client page and we'll work backwards of how we built it so here's the Pied Piper client and And this is kind of a template we use and I'll I can throw a copy of this template It's really easy to kind of add some structure But clients become somewhat unstructured because every client's different So we start with like a base structure But every client there's a bunch of little things that you have to do to kind of you know add details to how their systems are set up So it also is flexible. So when you see a template, it's not like it's locked in form fills It's general starting forms now. You may have noticed by default everything starts collapsed That's part of the convenience in keeping things clean so you can expand this and then you have people's you know Email addresses in here, maybe a company directory server login stuff Printers and scanners that they have scattered around the office the Wi-Fi login Information now you may notice some of these have hyperlinks now. This is part of the actually how we do things in production We have hyperlinks. For example, this is a Dell R520 and It doesn't go to a real one, but it's close I made it I made it the service tag one digit different and what this would actually do is Links you right to the service tag page That's one of the advantages with the wiki is you can link to all kinds of external data like that So you can have everything at your fingertips. This is linked to our screen connect system It's gonna ask me logging some in a different browser logged out But it would actually open and screen connect a remote control tool directly to that server So this is some of the you know how you service things fast. You can pull up the client information I have everything I need to log in I even have the direct link to their client file to their screen connect file So we can get in the same thing goes here the wiki demos. We have it This will bring me right to our unified page login. I can log right in it lands me on that client I can start managing your Wi-Fi So if they're already managed on there and that's what some of these do and let me go to edit real quick Because I'll actually say yes as Wi-Fi. Yes, these little summaries that top tells well They're not what do we manage that client's Wi-Fi? We have a multitude. We're not a managed service only and we're not a break fix only So these kind of help us determine if a client calls us because we have about 300 clients who do it for What the basis is for those clients, you know, whether they're a managed client unmanaged client what we manage what we don't manage Do they have a camera system that we need to know about and do we manage it is actually? How this goes it's this doesn't actually mean for in terms of us What if they have cameras as well, not we have cameras that we manage this what a client summary comes in now Once you go in to edit nothing's collapsed and you can edit everything and this because the visual editor is in here This is what looks like if you view from source It was standard wiki markup language Back to the visual editor visual editor makes things really easy because we can just do this Insert another row Add another user Yep, the number in there I like keep the dashes now no cell phone in there and then double click this and Save changes confirm the changes away you go now. I've added something to here Now this is important because what this is doing is making it very easy just to edit and change data when you need to get things in and out of the system and You may be wondering how do we change view the history of that or let's actually do a password change We did that change, but let's do a password change. We'll go over here Well, we got to edit get an edit mode from what Wi-Fi that Wi-Fi Save Yep Your change was saved We look at recent changes. This is a global version of recent changes We can see there was a change history here or we can click on the thing itself and we go to view history this will allow you to Compare the changes and right there is going to highlight just what was changed then and we know between this and this I Had added another person to this and we know who did it we can revert to it We can view That page as it looked then this is actually kind of cool thing. So not only can you undo it? You can even view that version of the page. So here's the version there. Here's the version there. So this is the version Where the Wi-Fi is was he where did it go That Wi-Fi, let's look at the version from 10.05 and it was what Wi-Fi So this is some of the nice thing about it It's going to track each user did it so admin had made some changes at 847. This is me prepping for the video So this is what it looked like when admin was doing it And then we go all the way the beginning And this is what it looked like probably with yeah No information in it. This is what it very first looked like when admin created the page So wiki will track in detail every little piece everyone who touched everything now This is also what the user tracker comes in We go over here to special pages user page view tracker And we can see everything that Tom touched or admin user only two users in here now when our production one it's got all of our users here I know every page that anyone looked at and it's constantly done and this can't be deleted matter of fact You can't delete anything in the wiki permanently by default. So the way this is configured It can't be done So if you go here and we're gonna go back over to our pied piper which put a search and I'm a malicious person. So let me just go here. I'll go right to the source delete Save all right, that's host Now if we go over here Pull up pied piper again. We'll log out. We'll log in as admin user It'll bug you to change your password because it's the initial password I set We'll pull up pied piper Nothing in here, but I can go to view history And we can see why we deleted 4000 lines, so let's go to this one. Well, there's everything Let's go ahead and undo this. Oh Conflict in the intermediates my bad We'll just undo this one. There we go There it's restored right back to the way it was Like I said, it's really easy to one see what anyone touched see what anyone changed see every version history I have no limits on these. I mean, there's ways you as an admin you can purchase things out But by default users cannot and when you're creating the users you just create them all as what they refer to as bureaucrats which allow them to Go through and you know create pages and edit pages and see things But you can't also create all kinds of restrictive groups if you want so we're going to special grazes special pages Create accounts and this is you go through you create the account, you know, whoever you're creating Whatever you want to do here. We'll create the account It's been created and then you go over here back to special pages Users and rights and then you can then remove the credentials rename the user reset their password reset their tokens Block them if you wanted to or go to user rights Bob Load the user she up with the username in there and then you can now grant The different reasons in there now I'm not going to get into every option to customize this there's plenty of documentation here But you can create all the group rights the groups and then assign things to those groups into what permissions they have You can get really in depth with their so you can control what people see in there or only give them access to see what you want So that's definitely an important part of it. So let's jump back into because there's all kinds of fun things you can do in here But that's all well documented through media wiki. They their documentation is very extensive on all the features. So let's talk about clients Let's talk about creating new clients ABC client for example. So if we want to create ABC client All they did is first I searched for it cannot find it. So you hit create and it'll create the client Now by default it wants to create from source. So our starting point is the template But I can leave this template. I'll leave a copy of this as well So we'll create the client here First time so it wants me to yeah, yeah, yeah, so don't run the tour Although it was pasted in the tape. We're gonna save save and That quickly I created a template now you can actually make this faster by creating templates in there That will dump this in based on a command It's it's fine to do that. We actually created a file called template And it likes that there's a lot of ways to do this you can create template And then you can just copy and paste from this template from source to every new client So it's actually really quick to create stuff So our ABC client Recent changes Yeah, ABC make sure I write oops page title match The autocomplete does work. It takes a second because it rebuilds the index But what once you've created a client you've added it a couple times the index is rebuilt and they auto fine like Pied Piper does how it auto completes By the way something and I've never bothered. I think there's a way to turn this off the search indexes are built Case sensitive. So if you typed in Pied Piper With a lower P it doesn't necessarily find it and found this time It's a way there's an index rebuild that fixes that it's not that big of a deal Anyways, so let's look at our ABC Yeah, ABC client it's auto completing now. So if I type in Hey, look ABC client comes up. All right, perfect indexes rebuilt So here it's working and this is all basic so there's no data in this client or anything like that But it gets you the idea that you can now start editing it And start filling in everything and putting in there now side note And I'll you I'll pull this up real quick because this is kind of novel is the ability to do this. This is a Stock ticker that works in Google Sheets and please note. There's some links and there's some things going on in here So it's got all these different formulas, but we're just gonna go ahead and do a copy your standard copy paste control C Bring it over to here find the spot. We want to drop that in it really doesn't matter paste You can paste in different spreadsheets. This should work fine from Excel don't have Excel to even test it But it works fine from Google Sheets and I've tested it with Open office and it works with that as well But yeah, you if you have a lot of data already tabulated and things that are in spreadsheets You want to get in here? You can copy and paste it. You can also copy and paste Wikipedia information so if you had something you've seen you wanted to pull out of Standard Wikipedia for building your own documentation. Let's grab some data like this and There we go. We've now pulled in a big pile of information on there and you can start editing it It understands when you copy and paste from Wikipedia dropping things in from there So if you wanted to use Wikipedia as some of your documentation source, which sometimes happens Sometimes you have some technical things in here because we don't just save client data We save sometimes our own work instructions and build instructions for things and we'll pull data from different places And we can pile it here for our work instruction. Maybe how to set something up When there's a lot of detail and I need to save it somewhere So that's kind of showing you how to build a client and all the customization and do it So let's go back over to our pie piper client. I'll show you a few of the things we have in there So we're gonna leave page because I'm not gonna save it This is a network map of my network that I drew a while back in one of my other I think it's my virtual lab video so that I uploaded to here and we'll talk in a second about uploading files The other thing we do a lot of is like the work instructions So, you know per work instructions per data from old server Update the offline updater set up the time software. This is actually You may even recognize it is time management. We have a few law firms that use it and this is like the for one of them This is the work instruction for it. I didn't bother putting all the screenshots in here But we can do that But it's also whenever there's a change your work instruction This comes back to the data has to be easy to edit easy to use So some work instruction for cast I was actually let my wife play with the wiki server when she was messing with it So if there's a step three and we realized that we needed to be have another step in there So we can just do this some that other thing needs to be done before and Then we hit save changes. What this allows us to do and we've done this before You know, you're editing a work instruction. You realize something got left out Well, if you made the system really difficult to use and you couldn't just click edit and change it You would never update the documentation go. I'll do it later. I don't feel like doing this and this This is one of the reasons I like the wiki so much because that quickly I added under step and drop something in here Let's say I wanted to add another work instruction as well so we can actually just edit this section of the work instructions here and The way you create then you have subheading one So this is a heading and this is a sub set as subheading to so we just same same thing subheading to another oops another work instruction and then we're going to go ahead and use the numbered list, you know this first This second And of course you could elaborate on this and insert files and things like that most of the time work instructions You know step step here step here do this do this They're not always as visual as they are just processes and procedure to follow and Save changes save Now what's really cool at the very top here? Here's the work instructions and this is why we do these subheadings on these So you have the headings and then different subheadings it automatically generates the contents on the fly So some of our clients there's a lot of this result Just a massive amount of all the different things now by doing this and we do so much for work remotely We'll have this open in one window when we're doing to work And this is how we're just on the fly creating work instructions thing that way if another staff member needs to access that client They know the work instruction how to complete whatever task is done there if something gets changed We change it right away on there And this is part of documentation if you don't make it easy for your end users in your office to use They won't they will go on it's too much trouble to update is too much trouble to do this So part of the process is you know we log in we have this we go through the two factor It's only certain people on the list was very locked down But by making this really easy to use when a client calls one We have easy access to the information to if that information changes It's super easy to just click edit and just start editing the information of whatever change You know for things like hosting for things like Their logins we have it all right there with one click We can put all the hyperlinks of different pages as you know if you worked in it Unless you work in a single vertical every client's very very different So it's something to think about to making sure you have all of that All right now It's a little tricky getting the media in the quickest way to do it when you're uploading a file is edit source Insert media We're gonna go to upload select file and we got the pipe or firewall here So we'll go ahead and open it it does may you can probably take that off if you want to play with the code But it does make you upload your own work backed up firewall of firewall or changes on All right, so we hit save you can say use this image Insert Then you just take out the thumbnail part if you don't take it out doesn't do anything anyways But we'll do this now. We have the files here. So we're gonna save changes So it's a little bit weird, but there's the firewall config Piper firewall config and it says when was this uploaded now? Let's say you go and make some more changes to that So we're gonna go ahead whoops We don't need to do this again. Once you've created the placeholder for it. Actually, we're gonna put a breaking space in between here So Also the visual editor doesn't like the files. That's why I always go to edit source so it at source, I believe we just need to put a Space between there and now they're separated so the two separate files. You can clearly see what they are Now if you want to update this file, we're gonna go ahead and we don't need to delete it We're gonna upload a new version of it though browse There's the pipe of firewall actually just made a quick change to it some change made Upload file now. There's different versions of the file This is actually really handy so you can keep a history of all their firewall configs You can delete them if you want this will let you purge But once again, you can if you delete them they can be undeleted So you can now see and make Comments for each version you uploaded what those changes were to that file So if you ever updated a bunch of firewall rules, but then you go man I needed that config version from a month ago when we last changed it This is why I really like the way the way he handles files So the placeholder doesn't change because the file name doesn't change We just keep uploading over again, and it keeps all the different versions of the file That is just super handy because you into the version history of the file and you can look at it now I think Well, let me do this It doesn't understand the difference in there. Yeah, there's probably ways you could do some comparison of The files in terms of if they're XML and look at them But most time you're uploading, you know, if the firewall saves an XML some save and proprietary weird formats So there's another issue there So it doesn't let you really do a diff inside the file And like I said, you also have them on the biggies already been modified But something we changed was allowing upload of files that are not just image files on there So let's go back to our Piper Piper client And of course you are used are probably wondering the question. So here's the other file. What if we deleted it? Yep, let's just delete that and The file's been deleted now when you delete the file and we're gonna open more than one window here to make it easier It's still here It just lets you know it's been deleted But it's gonna bring you back if you want to view and restore and like I said Nothing's really deleted unless you run a purge Which by default the admin users I think only the admin use can do it and there's a special way you have to do it I believe through from the command line to There's the normal users can't purge this but we can view and restore these files Just by going back here and go okay. Here's the file history and go ahead and restore it. So reason for restore I Didn't give one But if you've seen that right there it asked me if there was a reason to restore it and you can type I restored it because someone accidentally deleted it. Now if we go back over your pipe piper There's that file back perfectly fine So they can delete but the delete doesn't technically go away It just goes into the you deleted this and like I said unless you purge it out. It's still there So this is kind of an overview of how we use the wiki You can look at all kinds of stuff. You can look at like recent changes if you want to keep an eye on What people are doing inside of it what changes have been made? It's really slick for doing so much this it's also kind of fun because you can customize things like let me go to the main page here You can even customize this So we're gonna source and let's go ahead and Delete that and make the main page. We're gonna delete this too Save changes save Now the main page itself when you first log in becomes this all the recent changes or You could go in here So special recent changes slash 50 another option would be I think you can do Special And I said all pages and now what it's actually doing is as each new client comes up it lists all your clients here So let's go ahead and add another client. Oops, so we do that go ahead I'm not gonna fill in a template save Back to the main page now we have ABC client another client mange pain You can see how you could have the main page and landing Like I said you just a ton of things you can do with wikis There's a ton of information out there and how to customize them But this is just a general how we use the wiki for managing all kinds of documents So if we have a lot, it's a great information repository for us For all kinds of things we even have you know links to things we buy usually vendor links Just all that data for your company rather than trying to have just a Massive mess of Word and Excel documents that you have saved everywhere that oh man Someone opened this file or did someone edit this having it all in one web interface is Very convenient matter of fact I even suggest for companies even if you're not using it for client management just in general Consolidating all your company information to a wiki Great idea and a lot of clients have actually done this they run their own internal wiki servers or confluence If you're looking for a commercial version Confluence is a very similar piece of software. It runs a very similar way of keeping all your documentation somewhere But it's I'm really a big fan of media wiki scalability wise This is the same as Wikipedia for the most part. So yes, this scales very well. It's a great tool I'll leave the instructions and link for downloading to VM so you can you know play around with it yourself And you know maybe if you not even want to use it for the client stuff You just want to use it just for creating your own personal document repository Just to have all your personal data somewhere when you you know come up with something come up with a thing You're like I just want to document and write stuff on here. I'll make it easily accessible. They're really good for that, too Thanks for watching if you liked this video go ahead and click the thumbs up Leave us some feedback below to let us know any details what you like and didn't like as well because we love hearing a feedback Or if you just want to say thanks leave a comment If you wanted to be notified of new videos as they come out go ahead and to subscribe and the bell icon that lets YouTube know that you're interested in notifications Hopefully they send them as we've learned with you, too Anyways, if you want to contract us for consulting services You go ahead and hit launch systems calm and you can reach out to us for all the projects that we can do and help you We work with a lot of small businesses it companies even some large companies and you can farm different work out to us Or just hire us as a consultant to help design your network Also, if you want to help the channel in other ways, we have a patreon We have affiliate links you'll find them in the description You'll also find recommendations to other affiliate links and things you can sign up for on Lawrence systems calm once again Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video