Upgrade

Yet another upgrade completed this morning. I’ve now moved all of our web sites to a shiny, not that new PowerMac server. Setting up PHP 5.2.2 and Zend 3.2.8 to get everything back online and healthy took about an hour (which makes me worry how much it’s going to break when and if I upgrade to Leopard). I had originally installed Zend to compensate for our lightweight server — until now, a Mac Mini (which, I should mention, did the job admirably for a year or two). On the new server pages are loading literally five to ten times faster.

Unfortunately, I was bitten by this bug, which effectively means PHP 5.2.2 support for RPC is broken. Fortunately, a workaround is available and 5.2.3 should be available on OS/X soon. If you are running Wordpress and found that your installation broke too, adding this line to the top of your xmlrpc.php file (in your Wordpress root) works around the issue:

$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA = file_get_contents(”php://input”);

Once the server migration is done (I’ve still got DNS and DHCP services to move) I’ll set up the Mac Mini as a backup server. OS/X makes it a breeze to establish a secondary domain controller, so we’ll have decent failover capabilities. A bit of scripting to make sure a copy of the web sites is updated every night, and we should be all set.