The Joys of MeidaWiki and VMware

Wikis are a useful tool. At my current position, I added a lot of technical documentation to the Wiki included in Trac. I wanted a wiki for my personal use.

I program in a variety of languages including C# and Java. Most of my recent work is in C#. I looked for a Wiki in C#. I found two.

1. FlexWiki
2. MiniWiki

I know there are others. Unfortunately, FlexWiki is abandoned. The source code is available. MiniWiki is just that a minimal Wiki. MiniWiki is interesting because it uses the ASP.Net MVC (version 1).

Both include unit tests. I am a bit of a fanatic about unit tests. In Working Effectively with Legacy Code Michael Feathers wrote, "Code without tests is bad code. It doesn't matter how well written it is; it doesn't matter how pretty or object-oriented or well-encapsulated it is. With tests, we can change the behavior of our code quickly and verifiably. Without them, we really don't know if our code is getting better or worse."

MiniWiki uses Moq. FlexWiki uses NUnit. Interesting neither include any logging framework.

What I would like to do, if I ever find the time, is take the Wiki engine from FlexWiki and marry it with the MVC framework using MiniWiki as a start. That is a good long-term project.

In the short term, I need a personal wiki. The solution is MediaWiki and VMware. rPath created a MediaWiki appliance http://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/Appliance:MediaWiki_Appliance

With the appliance I was up and running in minutes.

Last thing to do was to modify the .vmx file in the appliance to use a static MAC address. Comment out the following lines.

ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:43:85:c8"
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"

Then add something like the following.

ethernet0.addressType = "static"
ethernet0.address = "00:50:56:00:00:04"

The MAC address you select depends on your network. I want a static MAC address to allow my Netgear router to assign the IP address. This gives the VM a fixed IP address inside my firewall.

Fixing the Certificate Error Problem with VMware Server

I use VMware server for many thing. For example, I own an older version of QuickBooks to bill for consulting projects. I use QuickBooks once a month to create invoices. For me, it is not worth the cost of upgrading to a new version of QuickBooks. I have a VM of Windows XP that runs my copy of QuickBooks.

One problem with VMware Server is Internet Explorer needs the certificate for the VMware Infrastructure Web Access program. Otherwise, you get a certificate error. VMware works fine if you ignore the error but it is easy to fix, once you find out how.

The biggest challenge is finding the certificate. I run Windows 7. The find for Windows is useless. It rarely finds any file I am looking for. A slower, but more reliable solution is the Gnu FindUtils for Windows. You can download a copy here:

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/findutils.htm

Another useful utility is Gnu Grep for Windows. You can download a copy here:

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/grep.htm

On Windows 6 (64 bit) the installation packages for FindUtils and Grep install the executables in C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin

The standard Windows command find is useless; but makes it impossible to execute the Gnu find. I rename Gnu's find.exe to gnufind.exe. I then add the location to the environment path variable. That allows running grep or gnufind from any command window.

Gnufind located the certificate use by VMware named rui.cert here C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Server\SSL.

Once you know find the certificate, installing it is simple.

• Open up Windows Explore and browse to the location of the certificate.
• Double click on rui.cert

The following dialog will display.

Clicking on the Install Certificate brings up the wizard.

Select Place all certificates in the following store. Then click the Browse button.

Select Trusted Root Certificate Authorities.

Click OK

Click Next

Click Finish.

Close the browser. Now when you open up VMware server the cerficate problem is solved.