Reseller Hosting Apache/PHP Upgrades - 15-Apr-2016

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porcupine
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Reseller Hosting Apache/PHP Upgrades - 15-Apr-2016

Post by porcupine »

Hi Folks,

Please be advised of the following maintenance window:

Maintenance Window: Friday April 15th, 11:59pm - 4:00am Eastern Time
Facility: Tor1 - 151 Front street west
Affected Device(s): www2.pcdc.net, www3.pcdc.net, www4.pcdc.net, www5.pcdc.net, www6.pcdc.net, www7.pcdc.net
Affected Customers: Shared/Reseller hosting customers
Service Impacting: Yes - Software upgrade, which may require user intervention/user script updates.

Details:
We will be upgrading the Apache web server software on all of the shared/reseller servers from Apache v2.2, to Apache v2.4, along with updating the servers PHP versions from 5.4 to PHP 5.5. This is being done in preparation for a significant server upgrade across the platform as a whole: In a couple of months, we plan to upgrade the existing servers to considerably more powerful, SSD based dual Xeon's, running much newer operating systems (replacing the existing CentOS 5.11 based servers with CentOS 7.1 [very newest]), and consolidating the quantity of servers (since the new hardware is many times more powerful than the existing gear).

Upgrading from Apache 2.2 to 2.4 will lead to some changes which may impact customer sites. Most notably, the structure of permissions in .htaccess files has changed. If your site(s) use .htaccess files to define permissions, you may need to update your configurations accordingly. Full documentation of this is provided by the Apache Software Foundation, and can be reviewed here:

Apache migration notes (v2.2 > v2.4) - https://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/upgrading.html

Upgrading PHP from v5.4 to v5.5 is considered a minor upgrade, however some PHP functions that are present in v5.4 are deprecated in v5.5. This may require customers who are running older scripts/software on their site to update to newer versions accordingly. The changes that this upgrade presents are documented in detail, under the PHP 5.4 > PHP 5.5 migration guide, and it can be found here:

PHP migration notes (v5.4.xx to 5.5.xx) - http://php.net/manual/en/migration55.php

These upgrades are being done at this time, in an effort to make the actual server upgrade (which will take place a couple of months down the road) much easier, and to provide stability and predictability during this process. We have scheduled this for Friday evening (well outside of business hours), to provide customers with as much time as possible to deal with any potential problems outside of business hours.

Regards,
Myles Loosley-Millman
Priority Colo Inc.
myles@prioritycolo.com
http://www.prioritycolo.com
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