Time for a tech post. I had the privilege of upgrading an ancient Red Hat 9 Linux box to CentOS 4.5. Red Hat Linux has been EOL for a very long time, and was superceded by Fedora, which has had seven major releases. That’s the equivalent of running Windows 3.1 Well, not quite Anyhow, the box at hand appeared to be a custom web server. I will outline the steps I used to successfully upgrade it to CentOS 4.5.

1. Download the CentOS 4.5 CD set or DVD image from www.centos.org.
2. Put in CD 1 or the DVD image.
3. Reboot the old Red Hat 9 box and ensure that the BIOS allows booting from the CD/DVD drive.
4. Enter the following at the linux boot prompt and press Enter: linux upgradeany
5. The system will happily hum along while Red Hat 9 is upgraded to CentOS 4.5.
6. If ‘yum’ wasn’t installed, you will need to install it:
rpm -ivh http://centos.arcticnetwork.ca/4.5/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-elementtree-1.2.6-5.el4.centos.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh http://centos.arcticnetwork.ca/4.5/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/sqlite-3.3.6-2.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh http://centos.arcticnetwork.ca/4.5/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh http://centos.arcticnetwork.ca/4.5/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-urlgrabber-2.9.8-2.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh http://centos.arcticnetwork.ca/4.5/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch.rpm
7. Now, run the following command and press Enter: yum update
8. Allow yum to run and update the required packages. Reboot if yum downloads and installs a new kernel.
9. Since the box in question had a custom Apache and PHP configuration, I reinstalled them manually:
yum install httpd
yum install php
yum install mysql
yum install mysql-server
yum install php-mysql
10. I had to update the MySQL configuration to point to the correct socket:
Update my.cnf:
socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
instead of
socket=/tmp/mysql.sock
and add the following to use your existing database passwords
old_passwords=1
11. Copy any required PHP extensions to new system path:
cp -R /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/* /usr/lib/php4
12. Edit /etc/php.ini:
error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE
extension=mysql.so
13. Finally, set services to start up automatically:
chkconfig –level 345 httpd on
chkconfig –level 345 mysqld on
chkconfig –level 345 sendmail on
14. There you have it. The server should be happily running CentOS 4.5 now. Remember to keep it up-to-date by running yum update regularly.

Well, here it is!

By default, Ubuntu Server installs MySQL and PHP. However, it doesn’t tweak the system for performance. If you run a WordPress blog on your server, you may not realize that your blog could run more efficiently. WordPress relies on both PHP and MySQL. PHP scripts need to be read from a server’s hard drive, parsed by the web server software and then executed. Wouldn’t it be nice if the server could just skip the first two steps and just execute PHP scripts as quickly as plain HTML?

That’s where eAccelerator comes in. eAccelerator is a free, open-source PHP accelerator and cache. I’ve been using it for nearly seven years on personal and commercial servers. In other words, it’s very stable for a free product.

Let’s get started.

First of all, you need to ensure that you have the php5-dev package installed on your server. It’s likely not installed, so let’s install it:

you@yourserver:~$ sudo apt-get install php5-dev

Next, download the latest build and extract it:

you@yourserver:~$ wget http://bart.eaccelerator.net/source/0.9.5.1/eaccelerator-0.9.5.1.tar.bz2
you@yourserver:~$ tar -xvjf eaccelerator-0.9.5.1.tar.bz2
you@yourserver:~$ cd eaccelerator-0.9.5.1

Time to compile eAcccelerator:

you@yourserver:~$ sudo find / -name phpize
/usr/bin/phpize
you@yourserver:~$ export PHP_PREFIX=”/usr/bin”
you@yourserver:~$ $PHP_PREFIX/phpize
you@yourserver:~$ ./configure –enable-eaccelerator=shared –with-php-config=$PHP_PREFIX/php-config
you@yourserver:~$ sudo apt-get install make
you@yourserver:~$ make

That was a mouthful, eh? Next, we need to install the eAccelerator module we just created:

you@yourserver:~$ cd modules
you@yourserver:~$ sudo cp eaccelerator.so /usr/lib/php5/20051025/

Edit your php.ini and paste the following block into it after the extensions block:

zend_extension=”/usr/lib/php5/20051025/eaccelerator.so”
eaccelerator.shm_size=”4″
eaccelerator.cache_dir=”/tmp/eaccelerator”
eaccelerator.enable=”1″
eaccelerator.optimizer=”1″
eaccelerator.check_mtime=”1″
eaccelerator.debug=”0″
eaccelerator.filter=”"
eaccelerator.shm_max=”0″
eaccelerator.shm_ttl=”0″
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period=”0″
eaccelerator.shm_only=”1″
eaccelerator.compress=”1″
eaccelerator.compress_level=”7″

Almost done. Create /tmp/eaccelerator:

you@yourserver:~$ mkdir /tmp/eaccelerator
you@yourserver:~$ chmod 777 /tmp/eaccelerator

One more step! We need to restart Apache for the changes to take effect:

you@yourserver:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

There you have it. Your PHP-based scripts and applications should run nearly 70% faster!