Upgrading PHP in slackware? Possible? how?
 

Hello,

I am currently using Horde Webmail (a php based groupware) at version 4.0.9. The newest version is 5.1.0 and I have been trying to upgrade for several weeks (if not months) and I cannot.

Basically, according to the Horde's website instructions to upgrade from 4.x to 5.x, I should only have to run

But I get

Almost looks to me like "pear" couldnt see that there is a newest version out there.

From within the admin page of the application, I click the "Check for newer versions" button, and immediately it says

A newer version (5.1.0) exists.

SO I am heavily confused. I posted on the project's maillist, but did not get huge support. One of the devs suggested to upgrade php.

As a matter of fact, my slackware server still runs the stock 13.1 release of Slackware.

Pear
(Why is pear reporting PHP as version 5.2.13 while Zend reports it as 5.3.3 ??? php -v reports also version 5.2.13 (cli)

Some of the server's info:
Anyways, suggestions are welcome as php and web stuff isnt my cup of tea! ;)
Thanks!

Hi lpallard, The 5.3.26 package is actually already built and ready for upgrade in the patches directory of the Slackware 13.1 file tree.Aside from that you should be able to upgrade php with the Slackware build script from the source directory. You may be required to upgrade some other packages based on the dependencies.

Good luck. ;-)

Ok I went ahead and upgraded php package with the 5.3.26 from the patches folder from Slack's filetree..

immediately upon launching php to see if its all right, I get:

Trying to compile it from sources gives me:
Im not off to a good start eh... ! I think I'd rather upgrade using a package management tool such as slackpkg (if feasible) instead of trying manually to install hundreds of dependencies.. Possible?

Well, I think that the easiest solution for you now is to do a fresh 14.0 installation.
If you want to stick with 13.1 wich I don't suggest setup /etc/slackpkg/mirrors file with a 13.1 mirror then do the usual things
And no, you can't put there a 14.0 mirror and upgrade to it with slackpkg

You forgot to handle .new files. php.ini changed with the update, you need to have a look.

I agree but unfortunately, this is a "production server" and no downtime (at least significant) is allowed for now since there is a lot of work to do.

The best I could have to rebuild the server with Slack 14 or another OS is about 2 days top...

I am not so sure I can migrate the complete machine to a different OS. Hell Im not even sure I can upgrade the machine without problems.

I guess for now I will wait for the next period until we dont really need the machine and wipe clean and reinstall fresh.

Lots of stuff has to be upgraded at this point. Most of the front end applications are being upgraded from time to time, but the backend apps such as php or apache, mysql, etc are from Stock 13.1 and date back to 2010..

This short experience with simply upgrading php has renewed the feeling that sooner or later, I will have to migrate away from slackware, unless other distros are not offering easier management tools. I simply dont see myself sitting in front of the server for a week rebuilding and reinstalling everything from scratch or sources. Thats why I am still using 13.1. The only reason why I initially opted for Slack for this server was the fact that I was using slack on other machines and it was the distro I knew best. I need an OS that I can easily patch and upgrade without running into a dependency hell and endless manual operations..

A word of friendly advice - do not take this the wrong way. If you would have followed the Slackware security mailing list and had installed the Slackware 13.1 patches as they became available, you would already be running the desired PHP version.

One of your issues is that you attempted a software installation of Zend with apparently a separate version of PHP which now lives on your computer in /usr/local - which is the reason why Zend reports a different PHP version. Try to keep up to date with the Slackware official packages and patches, be very,very careful when upgrading individual pieces of Slackware-provided programs, and try to use SlackBuild scripts for all the additional software you install on a production server. That will make it easier to transition to a newer Slackware release or even to a newer custom software version.

Eric

Eric, I agree with you, this was one of the first slackware machine I was building.... I made a lot of mistakes by installing all kind of "crap" that was not necessary just because the readme or install instructions that came with the software I use required you to install the stuff... Zend is a good example. I am not even sure why I have this and quite frankly, I dont use it at all..

If I had to restart fresh with slack, I'd have to be very careful with what I install..

Now I am glad you said this:

I have registered 3 times to the maillist but never got any emails from it. I sent at least 5 emails to the maillist admins to inform them that something was wrong but didnt get any replies from them either. After about a year sporadically trying to register to that maillist, I gave up. You are a Slackware dev right? Can you help me with this? I can PM you.

I help with maintaining the distro but I do not have access to the mailing list manager. You should send volkerdi at slackware dot com a message about this.

Eric

Ok after a system update with slackpkg, all is fine except the php errors I had..

ppr:kut, when you say that I forgot to handle .new files, I know that you are referring to the .old or .new files slackpkg creates if the config files had changed prior to upgrading the packages but I am not sure how to proceed with php in this case..

Can you explain how to proceed?

Thanks!

Plain simple, I think that I may need to upgrade or install some extensions...

Rwading the output of "php -version", I see 3 different errors:

I have looked around in the system, there is NO dbase.so neither there is mhash.so.. So I believe these extensions were never installed at first. COuld the previous php never had to use them?

"fileinfo", "idn" & imagick" are in /usr/lib/php/extensions but php cannot initialize them.. Perhaps upgrading them?

As for "xmlrpc.so", I dont know either but I belie also upgradint it could help? "Undefined symbol" almost sound to me like the current file is not compiled in accordance to what the new php expects..

EDIT: Googling a bit I have found a blog where someone suggested to comment out the relevant lines of dbase.so & mhash.so in php.ini but I am reluctant to do so because I dont know if I (or something else in the server) will need these extensions.. How do I know which extnsions to comment out? The fact that these extensions are not in the system tells me that I can safely comment out these extensions..

lpallard,

Check the files "/etc/httpd/php.ini-*" which will have been installed by the upgraded php package. Check your existing php.ini for any modifications you have made in the past and copy the file to another name so it will not get overwritten. Select one of the two files php.ini-development php.ini-production - whatever suits your server best, usually that will be php.ini-production, and copy it to /etc/httpd/php.ini, overwriting your original.
Then merge the modifications you made to the original php.ini (you saved a copy).
That will get rid of the errors.

Eric

I don't think you are skilled enough to be a system administrator of a production server. That's not the end of the world of course and that doesn't mean that you can't try. Maybe you'll find debian or ubuntu even simpler at first but in my experience that kind of systems gets really messy really soon if you don't take care and that's what happened to your slackware server that imho is less prone to this.
Again if you can move the server even temporarily and reinstall slackware to the newest stable version (and keep it update) that's is the way to go.
If you don't have the hardware you can rent a server for a moth or so, to keep it blindly going is just the way to disaster.

Yeah. This server is for my personal usage mainly and some other people I work with, but nothing big leagues. You see, I cannot spend countless hours sitting in front of a computer just to make it work. I have other responsibilities in my life which are much more important than running a computer. That being said, I acknowledge my lack of skills because I never really had time to study it and understand it well. Perhaps in the future I will have some more time to spend? Who knows. I agree, except running my little box for every day use and this server I have managed to make work, my skills are limited, but everything I do I try to remember how to do it, what it does, how to replicate and what are the pros & cons.

Now a word of advice, I didnt take it personally because I see you are from Italy, and English *may* not be your primary language, but when you first throw a sentence like "I don't think you are skilled enough to be a system administrator of a production server." it may be taken personally and insulting to someone ;)

I once said something similar on another forum trying to be polite and make a constructive remark because the person I tried to help didnt even understand the concept of package dependencies and was trying to build a multi media machine :) I was burnt alive by other members just because my remark was not well understood.

Anyways, all that being said, I agree I need to sit down and rebuild this machine from scratch. Its necessary for several reasons, the machine architecture is obsolete (hardware specs), partition scheme is also not very efficient, I am using multi volume VG's to store terabytes of data, I have about 60 custom scripts running everywhere in the machine.. Its a wonder that it ran flawlessly for almost 3 years!

Something to remember: when I initially purchased the parts and built this machine, I only had in mind a NFS storage to remedy for the small laptop's HDD I had at that time. From a NFS mount to Sickbeard, CouchPotato, apache, MySQL, a document management system, a groupware, etc.. it evolved into more or less a server that we rely to store our data and databases...

Long story short, I will continue working on it for now and some day sooner than later I will rebuild from slack 14 or whatever will be released at that time (15 perhaps ;)

English is not my first language and I'm sorry it sounded insulting. I'm trying to improve it.

No worries.. :)

In the end you are right. I wouldnt mind to follow some kind of course or extensive tutorial to have the chance to learn how a server really work. Right now Im more or less fiddling with it, if I had to be paid to do it, it would have to be a lot more in order! ;)

Now let me pick your brains once more... I need to get better with this php & apache stuff, damn it! ;)..

Now that my server has upgraded to the latest https & php, my sites are no longer working.

Plain simple,

1. zoneminder displays a blank page
2. Horde no longer displays Java interface (now loads with standard basic interface)
3. knowledgetree shows a list of errors at the login page but once logged in, only displays the same errors in bold on a white page, nothing else. These errors were present before the system upgrades but were not shown on the web pages, only in php's logs.
4. rssLounge (a rss aggregrator) displays a very basic text login page

the list goes on and on..

At first I thought the new config files (httpd.conf & vhost-httpd.conf or php.ini) caused the problems, but looking at the httpd & vhost config files line by line, they are the same. Now php.ini has a lot of different stuff, but as AlienBob suggested here on this thread, I tried to merge the changes I had made to the old php.ini with the new php.ini file.

Some logs if you guys can see the cause of my problems. I think the system is severely broken.

I also remember after the package upgrades, I had these php extension errors. Trying to fix them, I have uninstalled the offending extensions, and re-downloaded/recompiled them using

and

Now the output of php -v looks like:

As you can see most of the errors are gone, but the only extensions I couldnt reinstall are fileinfo.so & xmlrpc.so.

Now some logs...

php.log
knowledgetree system log:
knowledgetree apache log:
httpd log (the log is too long and has too much stuff in it...):

OK I managed to install fileinfo properly (I think at least).

Because apparently Fileinfo is now integrated with php and no longer relies on pecl, I had to reinstall it manually by downloading the sources from pecl.php.net, compiling and installing it. Worked well but now php -v complains that:

Not sure why the developers opted to integrate fileinfo with php if you can uninstall it with pecl but cant reinstall it with pecl...

I am not sure how to reinstall this extension. I tried pecl, but it says

Ive checked pecl.php.net, this extension doesnt exist there. Where does it comes from??

Now this is definitely a problem. Knowledgetree complains during the setup wizard that this extension is missing. Again, pecl.php.net doesnt have this extension, only a xmlrpci package which I tried to install but it didnt work (compilation error).

And the final blow to the head. Knwoledgetree's wizard reports that:

I may consider a full system restore to a known working state (thanks to my rsnapshot backups) or restart fresh WITHOUT knowledgetree.... I gotta get rid of this pest.

Enough is enough. I am reinstalling the system to a fresh 14 install. After almost 3 years without updating, this is what happens.

Live & learn!

I know the feeling with those system, they are like a house of cards.
I think you will be happier with this solution and I'm glad you decided to stick with slackware.
As advice I suggest you for the future to keep updated and use sbopkg for extra software. In this way you will never mess up the system and it will be easier to mantain (since doing that is not your "core business").
That said good luck for the installation and configuration of your shiny new slackware system :D

Slackware forever buddy! I will NOT move to windowze thats for sure ;) and I will strive to learn proper system admin so the mess I ended up with doesnt happen again!

You are a good person, I appreciate the feedback! Im sure the new machine will be snappier and faster than before.

While I am at it, let me ask about hardware: On this machine I ran mysql and several php services... Im using an old Athlon 64 X2 with just over 3GB of RAM... AFAIK, I never ran out of RAM but the system sometimes was pretty slow (updating SQL databases, doing file transfers, etc).

SHould I invest a bit and upgrade the hardware or would it be useless in my case?

You have to identify the bottleneck wich in your system is the hd imo. Thus an SSD might be the best upgrade on your system. This said there is a prominent new feature in the 3.9 kernel that we have: you can now use an ssd as cache for a rotating disk. I don't know how good this work and I suppose that manually putting all the data that you need to be fast is actually better in term of performance but I would give a try to this and if it doesn't satisfy you it should be easy do dismiss.

I'll post php and apache stuff here since the other thread relating to the same machine is more hardware related..

So I am trying to install the proper extensions for php.

I need to ask a few questions:

tidy

I need this extension for Horde webmail, and I tried to install it using "pecl install tidy" unfortunately it returned:

Then I tried installing it manually by downloading the latest release from pech.php.net:

imagick

Again, this extension is needed for Horde, and I tried installing it with the standard method (pecl install imagick)

http://serverfault.com/questions/484...ntos-6-3-64bit suggested creating a symlink in /usr/local/include to point to /usr/local/include/ImageMagick-6 so imagick's install script would find the proper folder. I tried and got past the previous error but now I have:

Another forum suggested looking into imagick's config.m4 file and making a change to line 55 where it normally reads:

and change it to

Since ImageMagick really is in /usr/local/include/ImageMagick-6 and not in /usr/local/include/ImageMagick

Thats why I tried creating a symlink as I said before..

Thats a no-go too..

See next post for apache..

Apache misconfiguration

Simply put, I have copied my old configuration lines to the current httpd.conf, httpd-vhosts.conf, php.ini, mod_php.conf, etc (NOT the whole files since I thought there might be new options in the current config files which didnt exist back when I installed apache 3 years ago)

Apache starts without errors. Note that I will be running several web applications so I will be using virtualhosts (vhosts).

I have started by installing a small php application (RssLounge, a nice RSS aggregator). I created a folder in apache's web root (/var/www/htdocs) and moved the application files there. Then I chown'ed all files recursively to apache:apache and tried accessing the setup page but I get http 500:

Apache's error log shows:
I swear Ive searched the internet, I cannot find anything helping. Most people who had this type of error were having problems with Options, allowoverride, authtype... but not with ifModule..

My config files:

httpd.conf

httpd-vhosts.conf

php.ini I deleted everything that was commented out (comments, unused options) to save space otherwise I will have to post on pastbin or similar..

Please check https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mo....html#ifmodule

If you want to use IfModule in a .htaccess file you need to have defined "AllowOverride All" in your vhost configuration. You do that for some, but not for all. And it is not present in your rsslounge VirtualHost definition.

Eric

Hey Eric,

I have added the relevant line to the vhost definition. The link you sent me to (apache's website) clearly states:

So I would assume you are absolutely right saying that I need this in the vhost definition, however, its not helping.

The rsslounge's vhost now looks like:

Note that not inserting the "AllowOverride All" statement inside a "Directory" section, apache complained that

Any more ideas? Could it be because certain module(s) are not loaded or installed?

Some updates:

Tidy: follow the detailled instruction of user ljb643 at thread http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...et-4175467201/

Worked flawlessly! Thanks ljb643 for your help!!!

imagick: pretty much same thing as whats explained for tidy on the thread I am referring you to... downloaded imagick's source code, verified that imagick was installed (and it was), and compiled from sources with

The make install process identified my php extension folder and copied the resulting .so file to it.

Again, success and quite simple.

Apache misconfig:
Thanks to the folks at IRC ##httpd and #php, I realized that I didnt need virtualhosts definitions... As a matter of fact, simplifying my config quite a bit by merging the mecessary overrride options and statements from httpd-vhosts.conf to httpd.conf solved 99% of my issues.. The rest was a bit of house cleaning.

Now my biggest concern and problem will be to somehow import or transfer my huge database from my previous knowledgetree install to another Document management system.. (Alfresco or drupal??). I am extremely disappointed after knowledgetree for dropping the community editions without giving users a possibility to migrate. Im sure there are other people like me who used the community edition for years and uploaded thousands of documents to their DMS. For us, what to do?? Find a cheap paid commercial alternative, restart fresh with another opensource project which might just get abandoned in a feww years, or somehow tweak things until the last KT release works with the up-to-date apache and PHP..

I guess thats a MAJOR drawback of opensource... Since there are no legal agreements between them and end users, they can just pull the plug anytime they want, without wondering how people will deal with it.

Can't let this go unanswered... I've found the opposite is true. With open source, if the 'vendor' (which there usually isn't) pulls the plug, you have a choice. You have the source code, and you can hire, contract, bribe, lure etc people to extend and support the code for you. You do have that option. With proprietary, closed source, you are out of luck. There are many, many cases of a vendor ending support (or dropping a supported platform) for a commercial proprietary product, and the users have no good options.

P.S. thanks for the thanks re: building tidy extension for PHP.

Not wanting to start a flame war, I'm an opensource guy more than anything else, but take for example any contractual agreements with Microsoft Exchange or a similar enterprise solution, you KNOW when your agreement will end (i.e. in 5 years, in 3 years) so its your responsibility to prepare yourself for the eventuality the company providing the resource(s) doesnt keep the product(s) alive. During that contractual period, they are not legally (at least in Canada) allowed to "pull the plug" and stop supporting you, otherwise you are in right to sue them for breach of contract and/or failure to respect contractual agreements, and consequential damages.

anyways, thats another topic... :)

Long story short, I just found what they did with the community efforts and contributions cheap. Of course this is only my personal opinion.. I just felt like I helped them develop a commercial solution at my expense. Of course perhaps this was the point of the Community edition, but AFAIK nowhere it was advertised as such.

Now I need to find a new DMS system and migrate my DB to it ASAP.... Anybody knows a good DMS? Alfresco?????? OpenKM????? Im all hearing ;)

I have asked the Horde maillist for advice but havent received any responses yet. Im hitting my head on the walls so to speak to get their horde frameqwork to run on my "shiny" slack box.

According to them, my PEAR is NOT in my path (whatever that means for a noob like me).

I have tried everything I could think of..

My include_path directive in php.ini has:

Shouldn't this be OK? php.ini's comments says:

THis is what I have now and its not working. If the above is not right, where's the damn thing on Slackware?

You might try this command: (1)
to see where PEAR thinks it lives.

Then try this: (2)
Which tells you where PHP looks for stuff.

You want the output from (2) to include (1). On my system, (1) is /usr/lib/php and that is where PEAR lives, but I don't know if it is different on your 64-bit system.

OK I have tried what you suggested and everything make sense.

outputs

And

outputs

The paths that I got from these commands reflects exactly what I have entered in my php.ini. No surprises there. Then the paths output by (2) include the output of (1) as you mentioned.

The guys on the Horde maillist are convinced that Slackware's pear setup is broken somehow. I am not sure what to think. I dont know enough about this stuff but I am thinking that either Slackware 14 has major php issues (and other issues I wont talk about here) or the horde devs are not taking my issue seriously enough.

Not sure what happened exactly, but I uninstalled everything in pear (from the horde channel) unregistered the horde channel, cleared cache, and reinstalled everything.

Works fine now!

Strange though, I tried on a Slack 14 VM before I succeded on my local server and it failed too.

I wonder if there;s something Horde doesnt like about Slackware or vice-versa?

Until next time, thanks everybody for the great help!

As usual, slackware rocks!

:Pengy: