httpd 2.2.21 now available
September 22, 2011 by Jason · 12 Comments
I've just made httpd 2.2.21 available in my repos. No other packages were updated or rebuilt so with any luck this will be a smooth upgrade for everyone.
For those that don't know, aside from a few bug fixes here and there, httpd 2.2.21 fixes another DoS bug (this time in mod_proxy_ajp) and re-fixes the DoS bug that was fixed in 2.2.20.
httpd 2.2.21 ChangeLog
The Weed Dragon – I’ve got a flamethrower!
September 12, 2011 by Jason · 4 Comments
A Flamethrower is the best birthday present ever, thanks wife!
For those wondering, this is the Weed Dragon VT 2-23 SVC (full disclosure: Amazon Affiliate link). It's basically a flamethrower that you hook up to a standard propane tank. There is a cheaper model without the squeeze valve, that's the VT 2-23 C, though I'd highly recommend the SVC instead; this thing shoots a flame about 3" in diameter and 12" long out the end and it would be hard to move around without the ability to control that. All proceeds from the Amazon links will go towards either a hand dolly or a back pack to carry around my propane tank (temporarily swiped from my grill), I haven't decided which yet.
You can see in the bottom half of the photo where I've flamed all the moss and weeds in my pack patio and in the top half the area I haven't done yet. It's pretty effective and extremely satisfying.
(Note: my birthday was actually about 3 weeks ago, but it's rained a lot lately here, I didn't get to try it for a week, and then I was traveling.)
Everything updated, PHP 5.3 musings
September 12, 2011 by Jason · 23 Comments
Apache's httpd is now 2.2.20 to fix that bit of recent DoS nastyness, PHP is up to 5.2.17, MySQL up to 5.1.58, XCache has been updated to the 1.3.2 release, and a few included deps have been bumped as well.
One thing I've been considering lately is the upgrade to PHP 5.3. I was saying for a long time that I was not going to force people to upgrade because of the sheer volume of systems with outdated ioncube and zend loaders that would break (more zend than ioncube), but to be honest, you've all had a long time to remedy that issue, and with the EOL on PHP 5.2 (5.2.16 was supposed to be the last release, they made a 5.2.17 to cover an issue, who knows how many more times they'll do that), I think it's time to upgrade the repo.
I've personally been running PHP 5.3 on Amazon's EC2 for about 6 months now and have not had a single issue. I can't say none of you will, and you should probably all start reading the PHP 5.3 migration guide, particularly the sections on backwards incompatible changes, removed extensions, and deprecated functions, but I'll help where I can when the day comes to push out the version bump. That's not to say it will be tomorrow, for one, I'm leaving town tomorrow on business, and it won't be next week either, but at some point over the next month or two, I'll be pushing PHP 5.3 updates (with a warning on the site first, check back once in a while or subscribe to the RSS feed).
Oh, and as a reminder to all, updates are available early to those that use my "Testing" repos. These are packages I consider production-quality enough to try on my live systems and typically once a package is pushed to that point I don't rebuild again. I just wait a week and copy them to the GA repos.