Keeping things organised.

Wiki is an excellent tool for sharing the knowledge and collaborate with other project members. Who wants to learn HTML or spend time learning on how to use Wiki though? Most people that require Wiki are busy doing more important things. The best and ‘easy to use’ Wiki that I came across is Mintouch Deki. It runs on Windows, Linux, BSD, MAC OS X and it is free. Installation and configuration on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server takes approximately 10 minutes. It has indexing component that allows indexing and searching attachments PDF or MS Office documents (and many other formats). WYSIWYG Page Creation is great, though I would like to see a good spell check. Indexing is based on Lucene indexing engine and requires mono to be installed. I am not big fan of mono but deki and mono run well together since I have installed them about 3 months ago. There are some tweaking required to allow bigger attachments to be scanned and for indexing to work correctly. How can Wiki be used in forensic investigations? Sometimes running a big investigation makes it difficult to remember everything and I tend to miss/forget some important information because too much information and it may take a long time to investigate/complete the project.

MindTouch Deki Virtual Appliance is pre-installed and configured, and runs in VMWare. It can be run on a desktop computer to keep my records/discoveries. All information is organised and can be shared with other team members for peer review or comments. Cliking on "Recent Changes" allows to monitor all changes. Deki has great access control mechanism and it is very easy to administer. All information is indexed and can be found within seconds. It also has function to export to PDF.

Having different VM snapshots allows multiple investigations/projects to be run independently.

In case Indexing doesn't work:

Edit mindtouch.deki.startup.xml
add after word indexer

the following line with the appropriate html formatting

delay-index-interval 10 delay-index-interval

then restart deki wiki
/etc/init.d/dekiwiki restart

Log in to deki as admin and rebuild index

To be able to index big PDF's etc:

Change the following entries in your php.ini file located in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

and restart apache /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
post_max_size = 32M
upload_max_filesize = 32M

Also value for pdf filter has been changed to xpdf after XPDF package has been installed.

From

/var/www/dekiwiki/bin/filters/pdf2text

to

/var/www/dekiwiki/bin/filters/xpdf2text