FastCGI update

Just a quick update on the status of FastCGI.

I've gotten FastCGI working for two sites now: a beta version of Sam Ruby's feedvalidator.org and the admin version of the cornerhost control panel (that is, the version I use).

The scheme I used for the control panel uses apache as a proxy to a local lighty instance, which then farms out requests to the actual FastCGI process. Since it's all happening internally now, this looks completely transparent to the browser.

This technique is actually quite flexible. One application I'm looking at is serving PHP5 through lighty via fastCGI, which would allow you to choose between PHP4 and PHP5 with just a single line in your .htaccess file (or possibly a radio button in the control panel). But that's a separate project.

My next step is to get two separate FastCGI sites on the same machine. I'm going to use my own blog as the guinea pig. Once that's done, I'll open up FastCGI to a few beta users. Stay tuned.

MySQL 4.0 upgrade complete

All done. It was down about 2 minutes.

MySQL 4.0 upgrade in progress

I will be upgrading the MySQL server on db.sabren.com to version 4.0.27 today.

I've tested this on a copy of the server and it should be a fairly seamless transition, and should only take a minute or two to complete.

This is a partial upgrade, but it does allow running MediaWiki (which quite a few people have been asking about).

The eventual goal is still to upgrade to the latest version (5.x) but MySQL recommends upgrading to each intermediate version, so that's what I'm doing.

There should not be very many backwards compatability issues between 3.23 and 4.0. You can see the list of issues, but it shouldn't affect most of you.

The next upgrade (to 4.1) will be somewhat trickier, as there are cases where tables need to be rebuilt, so I'll have to scan through something like 12,000 tables to check for these cases. It will probably be a few weeks before I even start testing 4.1.

Anyway, today's upgrade should be quick and painless. If you *do* have any issues, please let me know and I'll take care of it as soon as possible.