Toolserver/User documentation

All toolserver users have:

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

SSH and authentication

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

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

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

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

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

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