Uno-Code

So as most of you already know, PHP4 is now masked in portage. It' will reach end of life upstream at the end of the year. You can read more about the "PHP 4 end of life announcement".

Most of you know me as a server administrator, but I'm also heavily involved with developing PHP applications for myself or clients. So this move, is a big on in my eye. Now, for the most part, the transition from PHP4 to PHP5 is fairly simple, but I do a lot of XML web service calls, custom error handling, and use specialized extensions in some of my apps. First, I'll discuss my procedure for upgrading 4 to 5, and then show a few issues with code changes.

To keep portage from wanting to upgrade to 5 in the past, I masked it. So the first step was to remove that mask so I can get 5. After doing so, portage will bring down the latest PHP for me.

When I moved from 1.8.7 to 2.1.1 I ran into a weird issue where sub requests were not being processed and blocks were not being performed if you were using mod_limitipconn. You can read about it here. During those days, I was running into intermittent segmentation faults with one vhost. I discovered that if I commented out the ErrorDocument for that particular vhost, the segfaults went away. I didn't give much more thought on it, but when we just rolled out to 2.1.2, we received more of these... enough for me to start digging.

What I discovered, if a location was using a proxy (squid / dansguardian, etc) and posted a form that was using the multipart/form-data enctype, without supplying a upload file, the segfaults would occur. I immediately contacted mod_sec mailing list (I'm tellin' ya, they have the best mailing list and responses to bugs!!!). I started working with one of the developers where we were trying to understand the cause.

So tonight, had to add a local user account on one of my development servers... and here is what happened:

hmm. I've never seen this before. Of course immediate reflex action is to zip to the Gentoo forums. Found out there apparently is a bug related to cracklib (which was a recent upgrade - Thu Oct 11 18:05:48 2007 >>> sys-libs/cracklib-2.8.10).

Simple fix is to do the following:

When I put this together, I thought it was going to be all about Gentoo Linux, but ran into another Windows issue today.. thought I'd share.

Out of the blue today, when opening Windows Explorer, it would hang. Checking the Event Viewer I would get the following:

o I finally got out of the dark age and bought some flatscreen LCD monitors and got rid of my old CRTs. I figured it was time since I grew a third nipple and I glow in the dark now.

I found a great deal at Buy.com for ViewSonic VA2026w 20" Widescreen monitors with $30 mail in rebate AND free shipping. So I ordered myself two of those bad boys. I received them today, and for some reason, thought I should read the instructions. It pointed out that the resolution should be set at 1680x1050. Hmmm. I have a pretty crappy, but reliable video card, and my gut said this ain't going to happen by default. Sure enough, checking the resolution settings, my card doesn't support it. Maybe a driver update will help.

So, I updated one of my servers to Apache-2.2 and Mod_security-2.1.2, and now I'm getting intermittent segfaults, which I think might be related to uploads and mod_security. I've been posting a few symptoms to the mod_sec mailing list, which has to be one of the best mailing lists on the planet. And now, I'm corresponding with one of the devs.

They asked for a backtrace from a coredump.. and you know.. I've never done that. So I'll provide a small how-to for that.

Configure httpd.conf to know where to post the dump (I added this value in 00_default_settings.conf)

I didn't want to put into /tmp for obvious reasons. Just make sure you chown the directory apache:apache and you should be good to go.

Next we need to take limits off on the dump, so we can ensure we get everything.

Okay, this has been bugging me a for a bit, and need to rant. Every night on run the following in cron:

Everynight, I get an email sent to me with the following:

On one of my sites, I post various PHP code snippets and examples, and mod_security's 50_outbound.conf would always warn about PHP source code leakage. The rule was correct, and it was in fact catching PHP code being sent in the response, but I wanted to allow this for this site. I did not want to disable the rule, since this is an incredibly useful warning, but for this particular site, I felt it was fine to turn off.

With mod_security-2.1.2, they switched from phase:1 to phase:2 on when they check. This is important to understand, because phase:1 would be too early to exclude a rule at the vhost level. phase:2 rules will allow us to manage rules at the vhost. My particular rule set was handled at phase:4 which is response, so definitely won't be a problem.

The particular rule I wanted to block was this:

So after my successful upgrade to Apache-2.2, I'm seeing these two zero length files in /tmp

-rw-r----- 1 apache apache 0 Sep 23 03:52 resource.dir
-rw-r----- 1 apache apache 0 Sep 23 03:52 resource.pag

Not sure what these are about, and they appear nightly if I delete them. So definitely not related to Apache service restart.

I posted this on the Gentoo forum, but haven't heard anything back. I sure miss the days when you'd get responses almost within minutes of posting.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-586928-highlight-apache.html

If anyone has some info, let me know. I know it's not bad, but would just like to understand what's going on.

Today's post will be about my procedure for upgrading Apache-2.0.59-r5 to apache-2.2.6. This is a major jump, and unfortunately, needs to happen. There are bugs-a-plenty at bugs.gentoo.org, and I touched upon these issues here.

The first step before doing any large upgrade is to scour the forums. I always want/need to see what I'm in for. I saw lots of issues with SSL, apache modules and logging issues. Keeping those in my mind, I pulled the trigger on the emerges.