Not all upgrades went smoothly, but are complete

I went ahead made sure all software for my sites were up to date last night. The blog upgrades went really well. However, upgrading my wiki wasn’t the most fun. After upgrading it from mediawiki 1.4.2 to 1.4.5, I was getting an undefined function error that was preventing the wiki from loading. This server is running RH 7.3 and php is only at version 4.1.3. Turns out that in one of the last releases of mediawiki they use a new function that is only available in php 4.2.0 and above. I was a little bummed at first because there is no way I’m updating php. So I decided to get a little adventurous and went in to the code and found the referenced function and commented out that line. It looked like it was something that was used for debugging anyways. Much to my surprise after commenting out that line the site worked perfectly.

I’m only weeks away from a major server upgrade where these issues should go away for a couple of years. [praying that sarge is actually released next week!]

One thought on “Not all upgrades went smoothly, but are complete”

  1. Ahhhhhhh, the joys of Debian. I’ve been running Sarge net installs on production servers for, literally, a few years now without any issues. I always run testing, and on my web servers I usually run unstable. Here is everything you ever needed to know to administer a Debian box :)

    1.) Install a package

    apt-cache search php4 | grep ^php4
    (look for packages)
    apt-get install apache php4 php4-mysql mysql-client mysql-server

    2.) Upgrade all packages

    apt-get update && apt-get -u dist-upgrade

    3.) Install a customer kernel

    make menuconfig
    apt-get install kernel-package (also ncurses dev package)
    make-kpkg –revision=mykernel1.0 kernel_image
    cd ../ && dpk — install [kernel package here]

    The best part (for me) is that I can copy those custom kernels to other boxes and install them as well. Not sure how much you use Debian, but it has been and continues to be the best distro out there. Once you get over the “difficult install process” (total FUD – the sarge installer is amazing – but text based still – who cares anyways? I mean, I install Debian Sarge on a machine in less than 20 minutes).

    Have fun and if you need help give me a shout.

    –Joe

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