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Why should I change from CentOS to Debian? (if any reason)
I have used CentOS for the past two years, on all my unmanaged servers. I have learned allot around managing CentOS the past years, and are quite happy.
But right before Christmas I got an e-mail from a Norwegian hosting provider saying that they had seen more and more attacks on servers using anything less then PHP ver 5.4.2. I can see that all my CentOS 6.5 servers is using PHP v 5.3.3. But Debian 7 is using PHP 5.4.4
I have now started to test out Debian on a couple of VPS servers. I can see that I have to learn allot more how to do things in Debian. But I have no problems finding good howto guides on the net.
Is it worth it changing from CentOS to Debian? Do any website working on CentOS work on Debian without any change?
I'm using Virtualmin and my first test is showing me that all sites is working great, but I have not tested any longer then a few hours.
Any input is important to me.
Comments
Pretty sure PHP 5.4 is available in the EPEL repo if you don't want to compile it. I wouldn't exactly make the RHEL to Debian swap just because of a single package version in the default repo. Just my opinion.
Why should you switch?
Why not?
Ermm , i am running centos 6.5 and here is the php version:
php -v
PHP 5.5.7 (cli) (built: Dec 11 2013 07:13:20)
Copyright (c) 1997-2013 The PHP Group
You can get the latest PHP on CentOS with the remi repository http://blog.famillecollet.com/pages/Config-en see the "Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS) :" part
It's all just a preference. Personally, I matured my Linux skills using Debian/Ubuntu so I'll always stick there. A thing to note is that Ubuntu is based on Debian so most things remained the same. If your still learning Linux sysadmin then I'd start somewhere around where I did.
I prefer CentOS because everything just seems to work more smoothly than Debian. Additionally, the support cycle for RHEL, CentOS, and other RHEL derivatives is 10 years, much longer than what Debian is supported for.
Also note that while Debian may have more packages in its base repository, good luck finding a package repository for something. It's generally easier to find third-party software in RPM form, and most of the time even in a repository for easy installing.
If you're trying to decide to switch or not though, if there's specific software I need to install by hand, such as GitLab or Observium, then I'll use the distribution that's better supported. In those two specific instances, Debian is better supported and therefore I installed them on Debian. In all other cases though, CentOS has been the primary supported platform.
I tried upgrading my PHP with remi respository a year ago or so, and broke everything PHP/MySQL related on my server, and could not fix it again, so had to reinstall the complete server. Don't know what I did wrong, but I have stayed away trying to change PHP/MySQL ever since.
Maybe try again?
As far as I know, you'll need to do a yum --enablerepo=remi update to make sure all packages are on the same version as which remi has which should update off PHP and mySQL at the same time as well.
Done that, but still yum update php or yum upgrade php only comes up with No Packages marked for Update.
How to upgrade php to a version higher then 5.3.3?
Do a yum --enablerepo=remi update, that should upgrade off all packages which remi has to the latest
I tried it with this command , and it didnt break mine. I am not sure about yours:
1) Enable remi
..
2)
yum --enablerepo=remi,remi-php55 update
my version was 5.5.7 and it just got updated to 5.5.8. Everything seems to be working just fine.
php -v PHP 5.5.8 (cli) (built: Jan 9 2014 08:14:44) Copyright (c) 1997-2013 The PHP Group Zend Engine v2.5.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2013 Zend Technologies
forgot the update part. Now it worked, and I have PHP 5.4.24
Has to test it out, but if it was so easy, I will update PHP on all my servers.
Don't know how I screwed things up last time I tried.
yes, that worked also. 5.5.8 installed. Maybe time to upgrade all my servers.
may be check it out first on this one , and if eeverything is in order , do it on others. make sure nothing is broken
Of course. I will create a new VPS now, setup Virtualmin, upload my backup files, change my local hosts file with the IP of my test VPS, see if everything works out.
Then I will update one of my production servers (with only my personal sites on it), test it out a week or so, first then will I update my servers with my customers sites on it.
I messed up the first time as well, when I tried to install just php with the latest version and had issues with installing php-mysql later on, the moment you run a global update with yum --enablerepo=remi update it brings all components to a version in which they're compatible with each other which makes sure it wont break
Worked on my test VPS, failed completely at my production server. Used the same commands, and PHP was updated to 5.5.8, but all my sites was "blank" when I tried to access them.
Had to reinstall the server...(good thing that I have DNS fail over) so the sites is running on one of my backup servers now.
Maybe it's my sites that don't like a higher PHP version? All are running Wordpress 3.8
@myhken, your hosting provider is ill-informed.
From http://wiki.centos.org/Download:
CentOS 6.5 will receive security fixes until November 2020. PHP in the official CentOS repository may be old - but all security fixes are backported (https://access.redhat.com/site/security/updates/backporting/?sc_cid=3093) from newer PHP releases as long as CentOS is supported.
That said, there are many good reasons to upgrade PHP. PHP 5.5 not only has many new features (and a much better OO design), but it's also noticeably more efficient. While some older apps are not compatible with 5.5, Wordpress 3.8 should work just fine.
Have tested some more, and all my sites (both customers and my own) goes blank when using remi respository.
It's strange for they do work on Debin 7 with PHP 5.4.4
Don't know why all my sites goes blank updating PHP on CentOS. It's the same as last time I tried.
Sometime obselete php code will not work on latest php version.
did you try on the 5.4.4 with only yum update on it? , i used vestaCP , there are some templates there , on one of them it was blank , there was one default one , that worked only. i guesss use the one from 5.4.4.
If it's exactly the same site code on CentOS & Debian, then this suggests that the Apache/Nginx/PHP configuration is somehow different. The webserver error log should tell you more.
Have u tried using a simple phpinfo code? It's useful to know if PHP is working correctly and its current configuration.
Have you check php open tags : http://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.short-open-tag
will do some more testing today...etc what happens when I create a new website on a updated server, and install a Wordpress 3.8 site from scratch on it.
Will also test if there is any difference between updating my server WITH my sites on it before the update, and if something else happens when I upload my Virtualmin backups after the PHP update.
The sites workes 100% on Debian with 5.4.4, so they should work on 5.4.24.
Are you being a fanboy or is there any issues with redhat?
AFAIK rhel is really good.
I have now tested this issue the last hours. And the conclusion is that I can't get PHP 5.4.x or PHP 5.5.x to work in any way on my CentOS 6.5 server(s) when I use the Remi respository. No problem using Remi, and upgrading PHP/MySQL. All is looking great there. But no way that I can get any of my sites running on it. They all get "blank" and if I try to use wp-admin I only get this page...
I have tried uploading my backup files before updating PHP, and I have updated PHP and then uploaded my backup files. The result is the same.
I have also tried to create a new domain, upload Wordpress 3.8 just downloaded from server, and the result is the same as with my sites, it's only blank (see here)
As I told you the sites workes just fine on Debian 7 with PHP 5.4.4
Maybe try another repo like IUS Community? They are also used by RackSpace I think and there are MySQL 5.5 server rpms as well:
http://www.iuscommunity.org/
They have always worked for me.
Don't know what I should look at, or what log to look at. I'm not an expert (thats obvious)
Can you point me in the right direction?
But, why would not a fresh installation of Wordpress 3.8 on a new domain work "out of the box?)