Re: Web host server requirements

[Jay Carlson <nop@...>]

On Oct 27, 2014, at 8:56 AM, Chris Wood <chriswood@metafore.com> wrote:

> I would like to have a wiki on my website, it uses mediawiki which in turn uses the Lua scripting language for templates imported from wikipedia. I set it all up on my website (hosted by BT Business) but got an error '/services/webpages/m/e/metafore.com/public/mediawiki-1.23.5/extensions/Scribunto/engines/LuaStandalone/binaries/lua5_1_5_linux_32_generic/lua: /lib/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.3' not found (required by /services/webpages/m/e/metafore.com/public/mediawiki-1.23.5/extensions/Scribunto/engines/LuaStandalone/binaries/lua5_1_5_linux_32_generic/lua)’
> On enquiring as to what caused this BT responded 'We regret to inform you that binary scripts cannot be executed on our servers due to security reasons.'
> 
> I’m now looking for an alternate place to host my wiki, having fired a question off to a bunch of website providers, they are all asking me for 'the exact server requirements for Lua Scripts’. Having already given them the above info I’m not sure how to respond.

Well, the simplest question would be "do you support recent MediaWiki versions, including the Scribunto component." That kind of requirement is easy for the sales/customer service folks to relay to the operations people.

If you are asking about Lua as an abstract thing to have in a web server, you are likely to get responses which assume you are building a web server from scratch, from source, or from recipes. I like doing that kind of thing, but just compiling, installing, and configuring MediaWiki on a public-facing shell host sounds like it would take a whole weekend, depending on my level of paranoia and feature needs.

Jay