Monthly Archives: June 2014

PHP 5.3 still shipping with DirectAdmin

PHPI don’t know why but DirectAdmin still rolls out with PHP 5.3 which was released in June 2009. It is now June 2014, how about an upgrade?

You might not want to jump to PHP 5.5 because it deprecates a bunch of the ‘old way’ of connecting to mySQL.

But is it safe to move to 5.4? If you want to find out and are running DirectAdmin, you can update with custom build like this:

cd /usr/local/directadmin/custombuild
./build update
./build set php5_ver 5.4
./build php n

Is your system still going to work? Guess you will have to upgrade and find out.

If you had installed any extensions that you compiled, odds are good they will no longer function because they were compiled for another version.

I ended up having to redo LDAP (which I compiled right in) and I had to redo APC and memcache as those were broken as a result of the PHP version upgrade.

To quickly fix memcache I just did the following to commands

pecl uninstall memcache

pecl install memcache

SSL & Server Name Indication

I recently put a request in to one of the datacenters where I have servers for an additional IP address. Of course they ask what is it for?

An SSL website was the reply…

I got back a note that we do not provide additional IP addresses for SSL anymore.

HU?

So there must now be a common way to put SSL on a shared IP, news to me.

Turns out it is called Server Name Indication which allows the hostname of the request to be included in the SSL handshake.

Turns out you can do it with DirectAdmin can do it, with a bit of tweaking. Looks like I will be putting SNI on my list of things to test.

QNAP & Cron – How To Persist A Reboot


QNAP makes a nice line of NAS machines. I had one that the power supply died on it after only a few weeks but other than that have never had an issue with any of them in service.

Not everything is so straight forward on them however, especially cron. If you have done any work on a Linux box you have encountered cron. Most people edit cron jobs using a web interface for their hosting company, but QNAP boxes are not hosting companies… You would probably try crontab -e to edit the list of jobs right?

Problem is, changes you make do not persist across reboots. A real pain-in-the-butt if you forget that and reboot to find out your jobs are not running like you thought they were.

The trick is you must directly edit /etc/config/crontab file, make your changes there and they will then persist across reboots OK.

QNAP has done a WIKI page about editing cron jobs on their website.

Oh no, Microsoft says Windows 2003 is dead!

windows-server-2003Microsoft has announced July 14, 2015 as the end of support for Windows Server 2003. Since there will be no support, patches, or security updates for your servers running Windows Server 2003 you might find yourself between a rock and a hard place.

I for one still have production servers that are running Server 2003, it has proven to be a very stable operating system for some systems.

If you still have systems running 2003, you might want to start planning your upgrade path. Leaving 2003 systems in production past the end of support could leave you with your pants down.