First, let me say thank you for everyone that stops by to reads my blog as well as seeing the latest articles I bookmark on content management systems. You people are the greatest and this has been a very fun year for me! Secondly, let me say you may not be able to read this post through the weekend.
I'm currently in the process of moving CMS Report and some other sites I manage to a new VPS. The original reason for the change was to move my sites off of a legacy version of Linux (Fedora Core 2). However, I'm also making the server change because of too much bleeding edge experimentation by yours truly that has brought my server's stability into question. Believe it or not, a reboot of the server doesn't fix everything!
When I originally started hosting my own sites on a server (VPS/VDS), I opted for the easy way to manage those sites by using an online control panel. I originally started with Plesk but eventually moved to cPanel. cPanel at the time seemed to be the control panel everyone was talking about. However, I quickly found that although I liked cPanel it seemed to be dated by the fact that its primary web server support was for Apache 1.x. Support for Apache 2.x was promised in the next version of the control panel, cPanel 11, so I waited patiently for its arrival.
This past week saw updates for both Wordpress and Wordpress MU. While both open source packages are blogging applications they are not quite the same software. Wordpress MU is intended to run up to hundreds of thousands of blogs with a single install of WordPress. Hence the MU in Wordpress MU stands for Multi-User.
A security update is available in both branches of Wordpress as 2.1.3 and 2.0.10.
Michael Kaply has been writing a series of articles on how to deploy Firefox 2 within the Enterprise. I wrote last year that one of the difficulties of deploying Firefox and Thunderbird in the enterprise was the lack of tools Mozilla provided for deploying the software. I'm happy to say that Kaply's articles do a fairly good job on providing some solutions for those organizations that need to manage a large network of clients. Kaply's original intent is to cover the following topics regarding deployment of Firefox 2 within the enterprise:
As we mentioned earlier, phpBB.com was down due to drive failures on their RAID system. Late Sunday evening, phpBB.com not only brought their site back online, but also redesigned their site. An announcement was posted in phpBB's forum explaining the details.
I'm in the middle of upgrading my VPS server from PHP 5.1.6 to PHP 5.2.1. So if you don't hear from me anytime soon...you now have an explanation.
Over the weekend, I upgraded the server that hosts CMS Report with the latest stable releases of MySQL and eAccelerator. The upgrade from MySQL 4.1 to 5.0 was easy compared to the upgrade I made a year ago from MySQL 3.23 to 4.1. This time around I also have use of CPanel which meant I could make the database upgrade with at least one eye closed. My journey with upgrading from eAccelerator 0.9.4 to 0.9.5 however took a lot longer.
I've been using eAccelerator 0.9.4 since it was released early in 2006. I've gotten into some trouble in the past by those smarter than me when I tried to explain exactly what eAccelerator does and does not do. To play it safe this time around, I'll give you the summary of what eAccelerator does straight from eAccelerator.net:
"The results we saw with the WAMP [Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP] stacks were probably the biggest surprise in our entire test. Enterprise IT managers shouldn't hesitate to look into the option of deploying open-source stacks on a Windows Server platform.
For some businesses, this will truly be the best of both worlds."
- Jim Rapoza, How the stacks stack up, eWeek, July 10, 2006