Toolserver/User documentation

All toolserver users have:

Shell account accessible via SSH
Public web space
MySQL account
- MySQL database

SSH and authentication[edit]

To access the shell account, use an SSH client to connect to login-services.zedler.knams.wikimedia.org (tools.wikimedia.org is a convenient alias) for this. When logging in, check that the client uses the correct private key to authenticate.

If you experience difficulties logging in, check the login troubleshooter; if this does not fix the problem, please contact an administrator for assistance.

Public web space[edit]

Your public web space is accessible via http://tools.wikimedia.de/~username. The contents can be altered via ~/public_html.

Do not place large applications, e.g. MediaWiki in this space. Do not host porn or warez, etc. Be sensible about what goes here.

Using MySQL[edit]

Access MySQL from the shell in the usual fashion; your credentials are stored in ~/.my.cnf to make life easier. When accessing MySQL from web applications, use sql as the server name.

Views[edit]

Each public wiki has a corresponding database, named XXYYYY_pub where XX is the language code (usually 2 or 3 letters) such as fr and YYYY is the project name, e.g. wiktionary.

Watch out for some special cases. The project component of all Wikipedia database is wiki, e.g. enwiki_p. Meta, Commons and Incubator are all considered to be Wikipedias, and so exist in metawiki_p etc.

These databases contain views, in most case, direct copies of the standard tables in a MediaWiki installation. Some views contain less data or are restricted, and there are one or two special views. Remember that you cannot write to a view, so all this data is read-only.

The user view contains user_id, user_name and user_registration columns
The user_ids view contains user_id and user_name columns
The recentchanges view does not contain the data from the rc_ip column
The archive view does not contain the data from the ar_text column

~~Changes to views will be announced on the news page and in the maintenance log.~~

Your database[edit]

You have been allocated a database, the contents of which are private except for tables prefixed with pub_. You can use this for storing and caching data, etc. for scripts or web applications.

Miscellaneous[edit]

There is a database, toolserver, which contains tables holding useful information about the databases stored on the toolserver
When performing SELECTS with a WHERE condition referencing a timestamp column, remember that the timestamp is in MediaWiki's internal format, YYYYMMDDHHMMSS and is a variant character field, so surround values in quotes