Shawn's Blog

a hair-band lovin', techni-junkie's banter about… whatever.

Older is not necessarily better

Posted on | September 20, 2009 | No Comments

Recently, one of our Linux servers died, it had been giving symptoms for several months that a problem was dying.  We had one main website on that server which is being re-designed by a “professional” company.  The new website requires to be moved to a Microsoft based server.  This change was due to occur on May 1st, yet, the website is still in the hands of the web design company – quite frankly, that is worthy of it’s own post.   Within the last year, the role of that server was greatly diminished, as FTP, e-mail, and most websites we host were removed and placed on other servers.

Because we anticipated the website change to occur “any day”, we decided to wait, and hope that the website redesign would come through.  To date, the website has still not been finished.

A few months ago, I had set up a Linux server in a VM environment in an attempt to start moving the remaining functions from the dying server to the new virtual server.  Unfortunately, since server management is not my full time position, this fell on the backburner.  I had anticipated that the move of the problem website to not be a simple case of moving files from one server to the next.  This past week, I found that to be the case.

The website was using all of the parts of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) setup.  When our original server was setup, the person who set the server up insisted on using an archaic system which used old versions of Apache, MySQL & PHP.  His reasoning was that the software was “stable”.  While this worked, the Slackware OS was not the easiest OS to keep up to date, and previous attempts at updating some of the software proved to cause more trouble than it was worth.

Personally, I like the Ubuntu system which installs minimal software, yet in my experience with it, has proven to be extremely stable, and easy to keep up to date.  Unfortunately, getting the website running on a new server was not an easy task.  Apache 2, while similar to Apache 1 had some configuration differences to work out.  The MySQL 4 databases were not compatible with MySQL 5 on the new server, so it was not a simple case of “copy & paste”. PHP caused the biggest problem, as some scripts written in the PHP 4 system, caused major problems in the new PHP 5 version.  PHP 5 is less forgiving on programming mistakes than PHP 4 was.

While using old products which are “tried & true” has some validity in some cases, it does not necessarily mean it’s the best in all cases.  Older software provides security holes which have likely been patched in newer iterations, new software also makes performing some tasks easier.  To me, keeping software up to date is a better option. 

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