phpwiki-talk

[Phpwiki-talk] Something very weird has happened to my Wiki

[Steven M. <mur...@dc...>]

Hi All,

I regularly check my recent changes and I have noticed that some of my
pages have been reset to older versions, some back  to the installation
defaults. I don't know if this is a result of a PhpWiki bug or due to an
attack, or a mistake by a user. The versions of the page that I would like
to keep are in the History, so I can restore them, but I would like to
know what happened.

Would anyone mind taking a look and seeing if they have any idea what went
on? My site is: http://www.murdomedia.net/wiki/

It seems like all pages have been affected. For example
Recent Visitors has been brought back to the original version,
Recent Changes does not show these updates to be done.
http://www.murdomedia.net/wiki/index.php?pagename=RecentVisitors

It looks like someone has loaded the files from the serialized version,
but I thought they would need admin privilages to do this.

Any suggestions on what has happened would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Steven Murdoch.

--

email: mur...@dc...
web: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~murdocsj/
PGP/GnuPG Keys: http://www.murdomedia.net/keys.html

Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Something very weird has happened to my Wiki

[Lawrence A. <la...@us...>]

Steven,

I agree - it looks to me like someone has loaded the original files on top 
of your wiki.  I think there is a setting in index.php which controls 
whether or not you need admin privs to do this.  You might check to see 
what it says

Can you look in your webserver logs?  They might help you work out who has 
accessed which pages

Lawrence

At 15:15 11/01/2002, Steven Murdoch wrote:
>Hi All,
>
>I regularly check my recent changes and I have noticed that some of my
>pages have been reset to older versions, some back  to the installation
>defaults. I don't know if this is a result of a PhpWiki bug or due to an
>attack, or a mistake by a user. The versions of the page that I would like
>to keep are in the History, so I can restore them, but I would like to
>know what happened.
>
>Would anyone mind taking a look and seeing if they have any idea what went
>on? My site is: http://www.murdomedia.net/wiki/
>
>It seems like all pages have been affected. For example
>Recent Visitors has been brought back to the original version,
>Recent Changes does not show these updates to be done.
>http://www.murdomedia.net/wiki/index.php?pagename=RecentVisitors
>
>It looks like someone has loaded the files from the serialized version,
>but I thought they would need admin privilages to do this.
>
>Any suggestions on what has happened would be greatly appreciated.
>
>Thanks in advance,
>Steven Murdoch.
>
>--
>
>email: mur...@dc...
>web: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~murdocsj/
>PGP/GnuPG Keys: http://www.murdomedia.net/keys.html
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Phpwiki-talk mailing list
>Php...@li...
>https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/phpwiki-talk

Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Something very weird has happened to my Wiki

[Jeff D. <da...@da...>]

On Fri, 11 Jan 2002 15:23:38 +0000
"Lawrence Akka" <la...@us...> wrote:

> I agree - it looks to me like someone has loaded the original files on
top > of your wiki. 

That's what it looks like to me, too...

> I think there is a setting in index.php which controls 
> whether or not you need admin privs to do this.

No.  You should always need admin privs to do that.  (The setting you're
thinking about controls whether one can make zip-dumps without
admin privs.)

> Can you look in your webserver logs?  They might help you work out who
has > accessed which pages

Yes.  That's the first thing to look at.

I suppose one possibility is that for some reason PhpWiki sporadically
thinks HomePage is missing, and therefore "loads up a virgin wiki".
That shouldn't, of course, happen; and I don't, off hand, have any
suspicions of why it might.

Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Something very weird has happened to my Wiki

[Lawrence A. <Law...@th...>]

Actually, Jeff, if you delete HomePage, all the Virgin pages are reloaded - I just tested it 
on a dummy wiki on my pc. I am sure that is what has happened in this case.  Someone 
has deleted the HomePage, and as a result a lot of other pages have been overwritten.  
Clearly this is an undesirable "feature".  The Virgin wiki should only be loaded if the 
Home page is missing, and its most recent version is 1, or something like that

Lawrence


> 
> I suppose one possibility is that for some reason PhpWiki sporadically
> thinks HomePage is missing, and therefore "loads up a virgin wiki".
> That shouldn't, of course, happen; and I don't, off hand, have any
> suspicions of why it might.
> 

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Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Something very weird has happened to my Wiki

[Jeff D. <da...@da...>]

On Fri, 11 Jan 2002 19:33:25 -0000
"Lawrence Akka" <Law...@th...> wrote:

> Actually, Jeff, if you delete HomePage, all the Virgin pages are
reloaded 

Aha!  Yes, of course.

> Clearly this is an undesirable "feature".  The Virgin wiki should only
be loaded if the > Home page is missing, and its most recent version is 1,
or something like that

Actually, I think the virgin wiki should probably only be loaded if the
page database is empty (no pages).  The rest of the time, it should take
manual intervention (i.e. load pgsrc via PhpWikiAdministration).

Short term problems with this:

1. People who don't run PHP as an apache module currently can't use any of
the administrative features, as the current login code (I think) depends
on mod_php.  (As always: once we move away from HTTP auth base
authentification, this will cease to be a problem.)

2. Reini's bug: where the load-up of the version wiki seems to crap out in
mid de-virginization.

Also, I think we need to introduce some kind of versioning meta-data into
the stock pgsrc.

When one upgrades to a new release of PhpWiki, in general one does not
want to replace most of the pgsrc.  On the other hand, sometimes upgrading
PhpWiki will break some of the "magic pages" (PhpWikiAdministration,
RecentChanges, TitleSearch, etc...)  If each page in the distributed pgsrc
had a pgsrc_version meta-data, then there could be an option to only
update the page if the pgsrc_version is greater than that currently in the
database.  (The "major" part of pgsrc_version should be incremented when
there are functional changes to the page, the "minor" version gets bumped
everytime the pgsrc is modified.)

Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Something very weird has happened to my Wiki

[Lawrence A. <la...@us...>]

I forgot to say, if you are running a recent version of phpWiki, you may 
find that it has kept its own logs - look in index.php again

Lawrence


At 15:15 11/01/2002, Steven Murdoch wrote:
>Hi All,
>
>I regularly check my recent changes and I have noticed that some of my
>pages have been reset to older versions, some back  to the installation
>defaults. I don't know if this is a result of a PhpWiki bug or due to an
>attack, or a mistake by a user. The versions of the page that I would like
>to keep are in the History, so I can restore them, but I would like to
>know what happened.
>
>Would anyone mind taking a look and seeing if they have any idea what went
>on? My site is: http://www.murdomedia.net/wiki/
>
>It seems like all pages have been affected. For example
>Recent Visitors has been brought back to the original version,
>Recent Changes does not show these updates to be done.
>http://www.murdomedia.net/wiki/index.php?pagename=RecentVisitors
>
>It looks like someone has loaded the files from the serialized version,
>but I thought they would need admin privilages to do this.
>
>Any suggestions on what has happened would be greatly appreciated.
>
>Thanks in advance,
>Steven Murdoch.
>
>--
>
>email: mur...@dc...
>web: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~murdocsj/
>PGP/GnuPG Keys: http://www.murdomedia.net/keys.html
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Phpwiki-talk mailing list
>Php...@li...
>https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/phpwiki-talk