Upgrading PHP on a Cobalt RaQ 550

So, after the success of getting MySQL to work properly on the server I installed phpMyAdmin. It didn’t work at first but I changed something in php.ini (described later) and then it did but it was complaining and suggesting a PHP upgrade. So I checked the version and my jaw nearly dropped when I saw the spanking new RaQ 550 was running stone age old PHP 4.0.6. Argh. It was time to search for a guide on upgrading PHP on RaQ 550. I found it quick.

That guide is very well written and so it’s easy to follow but I had to do a few things differently on my client’s appliance. First of all as 4.3.4 is the latest stable version of PHP at the time of writing this I obviously used this version and not 4.3.3 as stated in the guide. It looked like I didn’t have IMAP and libmcrypt installed and I didn’t bother to install them (maybe I’ll need them in the future, and I’ll have to install them and recompile PHP, grrr!) so I dropped the following three lines from my ./configure command:

--with-imap \
--with-imap-ssl \
--with-mcrypt=shared \

This way the ./configure command went through without any problems. Then down at the ‘Modify user-space web server to use new PHP library’ section the following lines:

AddType application/x-httpd-php4 .php3
AddType application/x-httpd-php4 .php4
AddType application/x-httpd-php4 .php

were not located in the httpd.conf file on my appliance but in srm.conf which is in the same directory. Obviously, I modified that file.

What this guide omits to say (because it isn’t really it’s scope) but I found in another document is that if you want to make PHP work with MySQL you have to add the following line to your /etc/httpd/php.ini file:

extension=mysql.so

After saving the .ini file do not forget to restart httpd by typing the /etc/init.d/httpd restart command.

So! After configuring, making, modifying and restarting everything as described in the guide with the few minor changes as mentioned earlier it worked! Well, I was really pleased with myself and after installing a newsletter utility I went to bed knowing I just played with a 2500 euros-per-year thingie and didn’t brake anything. Phew!