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April 2, 2006
Fedora Core 5 - what breaks, what works
I've just upgraded a bunch of machines from Fedora Core 4 to the newly released FC5. Below find a list of the things that broke for me:
- PHP extensions. FC5 comes with PHP 5.1.2 which breaks compatibility with older extensions such as Fileinfo or POP3. If you're using PHP extensions on FC4 which did not come with the distribution, upgrading to FC5 will most likely break them. In the case of POP3, the fix involves replacing a couple of lines of code in pop3.c:
intern->zo.in_get = 0;
intern->zo.in_set = 0;
with:
intern->zo.guards = NULL;
- MySQLcc compatibility. FC5 comes with MySQL 5.0.18 which is incompatible with MySQLcc 0.9.4-beta. Usual queries will return error messages such as:
[nemo] ERROR 1146: Table 'test.1' doesn't exist
Additionally, changing any value in a record returned with a SELECT * statement fails, making MySQLcc almost useless.
- MySQL - "INSERT DELAYED". This is quite an odd error and it happens on just one of my machines. All "INSERT DELAYED" queries to a specific table will result in corrupted strings. Interestingly, the corruption is not random - it looks like they are adding the string in the table starting one byte ahead of the string data, so the string size gets added as well. A problem in "php-mysql", I suspect.
- Forced Sendmail installation. On one of my machines which was (happily) running Postfix, the upgrade process added sendmail as well. Of course, after the first boot, the combination was producing lots of conflicts. This was easily solved by simply removing sendmail.
- .htaccess files. During the upgrade, Apache receives a new conf file which has the following lines in it:
# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
# It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
# Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
#
AllowOverride None
This renders all ".htaccess" files on your webserver useless, giving read access to just about everybody to your password protected directories. I like this one best.
On the other hand, FC5 comes with kernel 2.6.15-1.2054 which (finally!) fixes the SELinux problem with XFS and JFS file systems.
However, given the multitude of unwanted side effects, upgrading FC4 production machines to FC5 might not be such a good ideea, unless you have a weekend to waste.
Posted by Costin Raiu at April 2, 2006 9:28 PM