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php version upgrade - newbie question

Posted: Fri Jul 11, 2008 6:52 pm
by meridianni
I need to upgrade an IIS 6.0 Windows 2003 server from PHP 5.2.0 to 5.2.6...all the documentation I've found thus far seems to imply that you have to just get rid of the old installation, download the new one, and take the configuration from there. But now I'm hearing things from my boss about how he thinks you can upgrade PHP by replacing/modifying a few dll files or somesuch thing...

Can someone enlighten me? I'm new to this and don't really know what I'm doing yet....

Re: php version upgrade - newbie question

Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 7:49 am
by vargadanis
Bah... another PHP+IIS install. People still think it is a good idea..

You could do that if you knew what dll files were modified. If you know what are those files that are upgraded since your version, you can do the "replace-only-the-updated-ones" method, but wouldn't it be easier to remove everything and then unpack the new one?

They way I do it is that I have a separate PHP config file dir. I have multiple PHP installs. When I upgrade I specify the config file locations in the new version. After that I just let Apache know that I want to use the new one istead of the old. I restart apache and there was about 3 secs when the services were unavaliable.

Re: php version upgrade - newbie question

Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 6:36 pm
by meridianni
Thanks, that helped a lot. :) Too bad nobody wants to use Apache in my office...

Re: php version upgrade - newbie question

Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 7:25 am
by vargadanis
Well, tell them that for servers Microsoft sucks, linux rocks. Just think of it this way: Michael Dell uses a Linux box at home (partly the reason why Dell has linux computers on market), Google uses Linux as the OS for ther crawlers and databases and pretty much everything on the net. And I use nothing else but Linux at home and everywhere. :)
Faster, more reliable and better suited for server apps.
Did you know that IIS sends packets with pre-defined size no matter how much infomation it needs to transfer? This slooooows the network down.
Ok... I'd better stop here. I would be able to write forever about using Linux instead of Windows but maybe this is not the right time for that. :)

Re: php version upgrade - newbie question

Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 7:03 pm
by Doug G
Ask your boss to give you an exact list of what dll's to change :)

PHP is not a part of IIS, so any instructions for upgrading php on an IIS server will be from the php folks, not from the IIS folks. IIS is a very good web server, and runs PHP quite well when it's set up by a competent system admin (the same applies to an Apache installation, of course :) )

In my small-scale setup, I follow the procedure you mentioned originally, simply get the updated php and put it in a new folder, and replace the old php installation. Verify your php.ini by merging from your old one, and make sure you've set the appropriate file permissions, and you should be good to go.

Re: php version upgrade - newbie question

Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2008 4:26 am
by vargadanis
Yeah... Maybe it is a good web server. I read a few articles about it because of this thread and it does have some advantages over apache. Maybe the one is it's security integration with a windows environment. But in the hands of a sys admin who is not sure what he is doind that is quit dangerious as Windows needs extra attention when it comes to security. I found a good survay according to which over 50% of the webservers are running Apache.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_s ... urvey.html