Month: May 2015

More on PHP and WordPress upgrades
After yesterday’s mistake, I had to revert the activity from PHP 5.4 back to 5.2 – it is just execution of a script, without a problem.
First thing today was re-trying the blog with PHP 5.4. Setting this is no problem, PHP_INFO.PHP works – but none of the blogs do because of deprecated and non-strict syntax – but these wouldn’t be the biggest problem since I must have got them yesterday as well. To get them out of the way anyway, I redirected this logging to a file, but that didn’t solve the problem: the last error typically is:
PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected end of file in /sysblog/000000/wp-includes/post-template.php on line 734
The code does indeed miss the training end-tag:
<?php
else :
echo "<ul class='post-revisions'>n";
echo $rows;
echo "";
endif;

[EndOfFile]

So no ?> tag on line 734 (on EndOfFile line) which is in fact simply completely valid.

Yesterday there wasn’t a problem with this, so why there is today?? This means I have to revert to 5.2….
(I now know why. I didn’t close down PHP sessions so the current version still was 5.2, but unseen)

Second, I wanted to create a new blog using WordPress 4.2.2. I updated the file containing the database credentials, started the blog which introduced the 5-minute install. No problem – except that is stalls on step 2, the page doesn’t show anything except for a white rectangle, there should be a first-level header but it seems the page isn’t complete. No error message, nothing.
So I dropped the database (the right one) and recreated it (it must exist) but now I cannot connect to the database – as shown in the WATCH output….
Even on 5.2, it is a problem. Not really strange if the mapping is false….Once that was settled, I can get it running on 5.2 to start with. But it seems it doesn’t use wp-config.php, so take a look there: matter of protection: Should be readable. Once that is settled for all files, installation fails on the glob function – which is missing in this PHP version – now I remember why I wanted this upgrade….
However, the database does exist and tables have been created; some have been filled as well.
But now this is settled, I could retry re-installing the 4.2 version using PHP 5.4. But that fails – again, where PHP_INFO just works.
Tried it with 5.3, but that fails as well, but for no apparent reason: just a 500-error….And 5.2.13 (re-installed) runs into
Ident mismatch…
So I seem to be stuck with this version.
I could however try upgrading the blogs to 4.2.2 directly: Change the logical to use WP42 in stead of WP265.
But no. I need to switch to all defaults before and I forgot. So returned to the previous setting – with a typo caused NoService to appear! Even after repair, where Trips, Tracks and Travels have no problem…..
(As it turned out – after having saved last entries using mySql and save them into a file and restoring yesterday’s backup – it was just the cache of InternetExlorer that caused the problems….)

Give it another try: Update requires all specifics switched off and running the update script as administrator. Before doing anything, I backup the database, then switched to WP4.2 and ran the update script.It showed that a database update was required as well, I started it but that one – as wll – stoped on a fatal error: the glob() function being undefined.
Duh.
This is still PHP 5.2.6….
Restored it all: WP version and database. Wait until I get WP up and running using PHP 5.4 (or higher: I have downloaded 5.5 as well but I think it will have the very same issues as 5.4).

Informed Mark Berryman, perhaps he has something to solve the problems….

PHP Upgrade
Finally, I got some time to upgrade PHP and WordPress.
First things first: Do PHP first; I already tried 5.2.13 but ran into trouble with that. The next versions were 5.3 and 5.4, and I decided to go for 5.4. The procedure to establish this version needed a slight adaptation but once done, all logicals were set properly. But running a PHP-script by the browser always ended in an error: Ident mismatch with shareable image – being PHPWASDSHR, referring to PHPSHR.EXE. I contacted Mark Berryman, who suggested to download the kit again, install it and see if that worked.
It did.
PHP_INFO nicely showed the information, and even the SYSMGR blog was shown with no problem at all. So I could do some blogging – and there it showed there were still some issues with starting the page to add a new post (new-post.php) or, from another session, managing posts (edit.php), but on reload, it all seemed to work nicely – even without restarting the server. Since I planned to update WordPress as well, I didn’t bother too much.
Next step was the installation of WordPress 4.2.2; I use the zip-container since my version of VMStar extracts the files in all uppercase letters; both however won’t accept dots in a name, except as delimiter to filetype, and replaces them by underscores. Luckily, WordPress doesn’t use underscore in filenames, so it’s an easy step to change them back to dots, using a small script (I found the original after this!). Next step was creating a new blog, but for some reason, it stopped in step 2. So I decided to retry after cleaning up.
Here I made a mistake. I dropped the WordPress database -which contains all blogs….

The last thing I could do was restore it from last nights backup and continue working tomorrow…

DNS issues on Helena
Apart from this: the Windows 8.1 Pro workstation suddenly failed to access the VMS box (Diana) by name. This effected all protocols: POP, SMTP, HTTP, TELNET, SSH…. Ping on the name (requiring translations) didn’t work either. As it turned out: The machine considered itself member of domain grootersnet.local – I set that up in the zone-file of BIND on Diana but never implemented it; however, Helena found should be within this domain, probably because the .local extension seems to be some sort of default (I’ve seen it else where and I recall having similar issues in the past). Bow I removed it from the BIND.conf file on Diana, including the files that describe it, and restarted TCPIP$BIND. After that, translations went fine again.