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.