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» Essential Upgrades - All Servers

As you may be aware, PHP4 reached its end-of-life at the end of last year, and no more security updates are being released for it as of August of this year.

Our servers have been running both PHP5 and PHP4 side by side for some time now; this is an advance notice to inform customers that we will be recompiling PHP on all of our servers to remove PHP4 support within the next fortnight.

MySQL will also be upgraded to MySQL5 at this time, and Apache to Apache 2.

Specific dates for each server will be announced shortly.

Please take this opportunity to ensure all your code is fully compatible with PHP5 and MySQL5. This should include a review of all self-written code as well as upgrading any installations of third party scripts such as forums, blogs, CMS, etc. Most commercial and open-source scripts have supported PHP5 for a long time, but if in doubt, you should contact the developer of the script(s) in question.

Upgrading to Apache2 and MySQL seldom causes problems, however changing from PHP4 to PHP5 can affect some scripts. The main change to affect sites with an upgrade to PHP5 is often the setting of register_globals to off instead of on by default.

This is an important security change and we will not be re-enabling register_globals by default once the servers are upgraded.

OSCommerce sites have been noted to be particularly affected by this. If you are presented with a blank white page with PHP5 enabled, this is the most likely cause.You can either enable register_globals using the method described below, or modify your OSCommerce installation so that it no longer requires register_globals to operate, please see OSCommerce's website for more details.

If the disabling of register_globals proves to be an issue for your site, you can enable register_globals on your account via .htaccess by adding the following line to an .htaccess file in your script directory, or public_html if you wish to enable it for your whole account - please only do this if your script actually requires it:

php_value register_globals 1

Also worth noting is the fact the register_globals is deprecated and removed from PHP as of PHP6. Although it will be some time before our servers are running PHP6, it is worth bearing this in mind.

These upgrades are essential to maintain the security, stability and performance of our servers. If you have any questions regarding the upgrades, please don't hesitate to contact support at help@sonnetuk.net

15 Oct 2008 02:07

Posted by Support

The time now is 15:31 (GMT +0)

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