Posted on

31-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….

Posted on

30-May-2015

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.

Posted on

07-May-2015

Where’s the procedure??
In installed WordPress 4.2.1 – that is: unzipped it, it creates a [Wordpress] directory, renamed that to [wp421] and set the system logical to access it. But there is still some work to be done since with normal settings, unzip won’t store filenames with a dot in it, it’s replaced by an underscore.
Yes, I know I can get around it; VMStar is said to do the trick but my version (outdated…) writes the filenames all in uppercase…
I remember to have written a procedure to redo the transformation of dots to underscores, used it with one of the earlier update attempts. But I cannot remember the name or location, it’s not in the TOOLS directory where I would expect it to reside; not in SMAN:[INSATLL]…
Second, the downloaded version seems to have some issues, I see that 4.2.2 is available….

Posted on

05-Dec-2015

Setting up the testbed
Installed MySQL, PHP and Apache on Leona – the new Linux machine – , but there is still some configuration to do. In the mean time, I installed the WP versions that may be needed, if update from 2,6,5 to 4.0.1 in one go doesn work.
I also dowloaded FileZilla – it seems to be the latest version on nthe site (FileZilla.org) but I cannot het it to work:

[root@Leona ~]# alias filezilla="/usr/etc/FileZilla3/bin/filezilla"
[root@Leona ~]# filezilla
/usr/etc/FileZilla3/bin/filezilla: /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found (required by /usr/etc/FileZilla3/bin/filezilla)

Checked what is installed:
The libstdc++ package contains a rewritten standard compliant GCC Standard C++ Library.

That’s Ok, but the version isn’t: libstdc++-4.4.7-11.el6 (i686)

Absurd.

One of those reasons I dislike Linux….

But I should be able to use FireFox as well. But without anything (Iḿ not sure how to do it on the URL) I end up in the anonymous FTP location. Thatś fine in itself, but I need to get elsewhere, so I found an extension. It works – but cannot connect to VMS or IBM – yet.

Ok, just install the regular old-fashioned FTP-client…Found gFTP – a graphical interface. It took some experrimenta but it seemed to work – but couldn’t retrieve the filenames…

Posted on

07-Nov-2013

Another update – and what is to come
The main workstation (Helena: Intel I7, 8Gb (for now)) started out with Windows7Pro64, was updated early this year to Windows8Pro64 – without a problem. And now it’s updated to 8.1 – again, without a problem. So far.
Next should be WP: the same way I’ve always done it: into a directory of itself, and just referring the blog directories to their own location (holding the configuration and other local files) and the appropriate WP version file. Moving on in the recommended way – max two stapes at a time – is time consuming in installing all these versions properly, updating the basic version first and when that succeeds, the blogs. Keeping a database backup at hand, just in case. If all goes well, it should be able to do the upgrade in a day or so. That is: both blogs.
And there are PHP (upgrade to 5.3, which is already installed but caused problems; these may have been solved with the new version of WordPress; and there is the update to VMS 8.4, to be done.
cURL port support rejected – somewhat
I have been asked – a few weeks ago – to take over the VMS maintenance on cURL; I know it was dome pereviously – years ago – by Marty Kuhrt, but he handed things over to other people. But the time required may be too much, especially when the cURL guyswant to update in a monthly cycle, if it has to be combined with a regular, 40-hour job and lots of other things to do. So I’m glad that someone else. No problem to be involved – but not on my own.