As announced in two previous postings in July 2007 and February 2008, PHP 4 has reached the end of its development life; security issues require us to migrate to PHP 5, the currently supported version. We’ve been working on migration issues for the past several months, and we believe we can migrated based on our original target date of May 1.
To ease the transition for our users, we have devised a way to allow two web servers to co-exist on the same machine. (Geek aside: to do this, we’re using Apache’s reverse proxy directive, ProxyPass). Our current plan is to put the PHP 5 -based server into production on Wednesday, April 23 at 5:00 PM; we will continue to keep the old server running so that any sites which have problems under PHP 5 can continue to run until their code is fixed.
In most cases, code that works with PHP 4 should work with PHP 5, but there are exceptions. We know that the development framework LSCR has been using for our web team’s internally-developed applications (such as our department directory, news+events system, and course listings) does not work under PHP 5; we are in the process of migrating our code to the Zend framework. If you are one of our web customers, we will be contacting you about migrating your department’s applications to the new framework.
If you are managing your own PHP code, or your own installation of a PHP tool like WordPress or drupal, it might be a good idea to test your code on our development server, which is already running PHP 5, sometime before April 23. Mail sysadmin@LS if you’d like to get set up on the development server.
If you do nothing, your site will be migrated on April 23, and it’s possible that it will work just fine, but we would recommend that you check and test for problems. Most problems should be minor and quickly fixable; if you have major problems after the migration, contact sysadmin@LS and we can temporarily put your site back on the old server to give you time to deal with the issues.
Socrates, and its predecessors violet and garnet, have been providing a general Unix environment to campus researchers for something like 20 years now. The current server is now quite old, and the demand for a central unix server has dwindled. IST announced that, rather than replace the current socrates hardware, that they will retire the service entirely.
Many L&S academics are still using socrates, usually as a place for simple web hosting for their individual or lab home pages. It does not appear that there will be a simple migration path for those users; IST’s announcement of the abatement, and the lack of a clear migration path, generated a lively discussion on the campus Micronet mailing list.
In response, IST will be holding a Socrates Customer Forum on Tuesday, April 8, at 10:00 AM in Sibley Auditorium (Bechtel Engineering Center). If you are invested in web hosting or other services provided on socrates, especially web hosting, it may behoove you to attend that forum.
If you simply need to be able to use a Unix command line, there are probably reasonable alternatives for you; Mac OS X is a full Unix environment, and if you use Windows you can install the Cygwin environment to be able to work in a Unix-like way.
I posted last July that PHP 4 is nearing the end of its life, and that therefore we must begin migrating our sites to PHP 5. PHP 5 is largely compatible with PHP 4, but I expect that most sites based on older code will need at least some modification to work properly under PHP 5.
The final version of PHP 4, version 4.4.8, was released in January and was recently installed on our main web server. The PHP development team has committed to providing security patches for 4.4.8 until this August; after August, using PHP 4 will be a violation of the campus minimum security standards. That situation gives us a fairly hard deadline for migration, and we’d like to be migrated well before then.
We have set up a development web server running Apache 2.2.8 and PHP 5.2.5 to allow departments to test their sites with PHP 5. Contact sysadmin@LS if you are interested in getting set up on the development server.
Our target date for cutting over to PHP 5 will be May 1, 2008. At that time, we’ll put PHP 5 in production on our main server, and any of your PHP code which is incompatible with PHP 5 will break. I expect that most sites will continue to work fine, with perhaps some small glitches, but it’s impossible to know unless you test your code beforehand.
We’ll be sending more communications about this change-over as it approaches.
Many applications on campus which require CalNet authentication use the Authentication Web Server (AWS) service; examples include AirBears, blu, and a number of applications deployed by departments, including the content management systems developed by LSCR’s web team.
Due to the aging of the technology, AWS is going to be replaced by Central Authentication Service (CAS); the tentative date for the deprecation of AWS is December 31, 2008. Moving from AWS to CAS will require some changes to all the applications currently using AWS; the changes should be fairly simple to implement.
The biggest advantage of CAS is that it provides single sign-on to all applications using CAS; that is, once you’ve logged on through CAS once, if you visit another web site which uses CAS, you won’t have to retype your password. This will be a boon for most users, especially those coming in through AirBears who’ll have to use CAS to get on the network in the first place.
If you have an application that’s currently using AWS, you should look at the links above to start working on migrating to CAS. Both services will run in parallel for at least the rest of this year; you can move to CAS at any time. It probably makes sense to move sooner rather than later, since CAS provides better functionality.
