During the early hours of Sunday morning, on February 17th, we are going to perform a number of software updates on the following servers:
This is part of the move to the 6th revision to the CentOS 4 release (or CentOS 4.6) and will affect the following Packages:
These updates may have some minor feature improvements but are mostly bug and/or security updates. However, in order to complete the process some services will need to be restarted. Downtime will be minimal while each of these reload, lasting no more than about 30 seconds at a time.
We have also been experiencing a number of minor issues with some functions affecting PHP on the server gamma.jabservers.co.uk. to versions 5.1.6 of PHP (the latest stable release available from the CentOS repository).
We will also take the opportunity to do the same with beta.jabservers.co.uk (although it is already on version 5.0.x, so will not be as large a jump as with gamma.jabservers.co.uk).
What will this mean for PHP4 users on gamma.jabservers.co.uk?
In theory, not a lot. PHP5 was designed to be fully backwards compatible with PHP4, and is simply an evolution rather than a revolution or rewrite, with the biggest improvement coming from better OOP support and support for the new MySQL interface (not enabled on our servers currently).
Full details of the incompatibility between the two major versions can be found at:
Please accept our apologies for the short notice given in this upgrade and if you do have any questions, or would like assistance as part of the update, please let us know.