Organizations share some responsibility for what goes on within the computers and networks they provide for their students and employees. Wiki intends to work smoothly within these frameworks but may not come fully configured to do so out of the box.
The wiki node module includes a ready to run application server with sufficient client javascript contained within to provide users with site hosting and network based collaboration with other servers hosting federated wiki sites. This may be suitable as is for institutional use.
We consider two cases where institutional administrators will be especially concerned, networking and login. See also Backup and Update which won't be much different for any administrator.
# Networking
An institutional administrator may want to host sites behind a firewall and provide private dns support for their access within the host naming conventions already in place.
Sites hosted within a farm are most conveniently addressed with a DNS Wildcard so as to avoid frequent updates to dns tables.
Sites that are to be exposed to the open web can have their traffic routed to the wiki server with a reverse proxy as one would with any subdomain served by an application server.
# Login
We support farms where sites are created spontaneously on first access and then ownership established by Claims through the web interface.
Sites could be 'born claimed' by creating the desired flat-file subdirectories and inserting the intended owner's email in the status subdirectory of each site.
Consider the case where we have a file, roster.txt, containing site names and user email addresses.
jodo.example.com john.doe@example.com masm.example.com mary.smith@example.com bijo.example.com bill.jones@example.com ...
Then we could use a script to create the farm site and claim it by recording the owner email address as the persona.identity.
cat roster.txt | perl -pe ' s/(\S+) (\S+)/ mkdir -p $1\/status; echo -n $2 > $1\/status\/persona.identity/ ' | bash
This script works by transforming the roster into a new script that creates the desired files. Note that we use echo's -n option to omit a trailing newline as is required by Persona. Note also that -n is only available in the bash implementation of echo.
We can test automatic creation of sites in a temporary location and then launch a separate wiki to try logins.
wiki -f -p 3080 -d /tmp/wiki