Hosting my Own Private Wiki

I installed the MediaWiki package in my local server. It's an open source package for hosting a Wiki. So far I've setup a simple LAMP stack on my local server and then ran the MediaWiki setup script. It's pretty straight forward and downright simple. The LAMP stack has such a wide following that you can find documentation on installing it everywhere.

I used Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS for this. There are a couple of different ways to setup LAMP through package systems. You can either use tasksel which automates the entire installation or install each package one by one.

I use the Wiki to document my studies into Unix and Linux administration. It's pretty cool that I can throw some of my writings and code onto a server and reference it afterwards. There are other ways to do this; using Google docs, or MS word, but the Wiki seems like the perfect medium.

It also occurred to me that I needed to backup the data on the Wiki. So I googled ways to do this. The simplest seems to be doing a mysqldump of my entries. Here's an example of that.

mysqldump -h localhost -u root --password --default-character-set=utf8 my_wiki > backup.sql