hello, I was jsut wondering what steps to take and how to prepare when 4.0 will be ready, I mean I know it will not be hard tu upgrade, something like apt-get update followed by apt-get dist-upgrade should just work but I was wondering on the implications of upgrading as there are some really big upgrades as I know about these upcoming new versions in 4.0: PHP 5.2.0 and MySQL 5.0.30 so how can I make sure, not all my clients sites break when I do this upgrade? are there any tests I can perform? can I somehow leave php 4.?? enabled too? what is there to do? btw. I initially used the debian 3.1 perfect setup from howtoforge.
Do you have the option to do the upgrade on a test system before doing this on a live server? I use an "old" server to pre-test (almost) everything I do on my live servers, especially with such a massive impact. When I switched from Sarge to Ubuntu 6.10 I even started completely from scratch with new hardware and transferred sites one by one.
how would I start with this? I do have an old pc at home where I could install 4.0 as soon as it is officially released, BUT I would have to downlaod the whole data from the old server, fix all things like hostname, IP whatever, it would be a complete reconfiguration as I have different hardware at home, can't afford another live-serevr for testing, don't know my clients software, so I would have to figure out what each client is running, and test it? Seems like overkill to me, hmm....
I would still prefer the extra work compared to the possibility of having upset customers who's websites are no longer working and when something is really broke it will take a lot of time to get fixed. FWIW an example: I transferred a PHP app from MySQL 4 to MySQL 5 and found that the join clause changed it's behaviour extensively (less relaxed on the approved SQL syntax), breaking around 50% of the SQL statements in that app. It was a rather large app. It took me a week (admitted, not 100% full time) to update the application. If you have customers with their own applications, being themselves responsible for these applications, I hope I'm allowed to give you the advise to do careful planning and communication. The hardware shouldn't be too much of an issue, but the upgraded versions of PHP, MySQL, maybe Apache2 vs Apache1 now, etc I would definitely test.
Thx for the advice, its mainly one big customer, I am i ncharge of the rest of the sites - I made them I host them, so I'll take care of them,..... I'll have to have a talk with this one customer...
