Its_All.Lost
Because hope just breeds everlasting misery…

Upgrading PHP on ClearOS (Part 1)

I need php higjer than 5.4 for a project. ClesrOS isn’t using 5.4+. Bastards. So here is my atyempt at upgesfing php on clearos 7. Some shit went vad during the upgrade,  i lost my original post which was more detailed. Typing this on my cell, I’ll clean up later. But for now here it is. Its a mess. 

http://www.clearos.com/resources/documentation/clearos/content:en_us:kb_howtos_upgrading_to_php_5.5.x

yum –enablerepo=clearos-updates-testing update

About 40 or so update it seems…hung up on kernel.x86_64 0:3.10.0-327.10.1.v7…then had dependency issues with libnatpmp. Hey at least it’s only one. And it has to do with Transmission. Which cannot be found in the repo’s, naturally. Which is for NAT routing.

Can’t install with yum, wont find it. Seem to vaguely remember this issue before, and maybe with Plex. Anyways found an RPM for Fedora EPEL7, gonna try that.

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=712607

run testting update again

hanging on kernel again, dependency issues? …. NO! Woo hoo fixed the issue. Now to download 47mb of updates and hope the system doesn’t break!

Here’s where shit goes bad. I staryed the updates and they went ok. I saw the errors the other page mentioned, ok. All done it was. Complete it said. But the instructions say to reboot, which I had to cause the phpinfo page was still showing php 5.4. I rebooted. Which I fucking hate doing, because ClearOS can never seem to get an IP address from my modem when I do. Then I am stuck doing the IP dance. Fuck that noise. But I had to. 

Reboot went ok, fucker even tried to say I had an IP still, which I now believe was true. But the net wasn’t working. Nothing. So I spent an hour trying to get an IP from my modem. Nothing. At this point I am pissed off, and fuck ClearOS.

I connected my “emergency rotuer” and hopped on the web looking for a ClearOS alternative. Fucking shit. There isn’t one, and I just couldn’t come to terms with rolling my own. I need an easy way to manage IP addresses. I looked into some others but nothing debian or even centos based was any good for me. Everything is BSD. Don’t want that. Don’t know it. Don’t wanna learn it. So I reluctantly reinstalled ClearOS 7.2. No, its still having fucking problems. And now I am down to php 5.4 again. Fuck. 

I’ll edit this post later and clesn it up but for now…i was able to updste to php 5.5.33 but i lost all connections to the outside. Not 100% sure this was thr case but i am hanging it on a solid hunch. Back to square one. 

ClearOS and SMTP with Comcast

With ClearOS 6 I was never able to get outgoing mail to work decently. Sure I could have used Comcast as a relay but then all my mail shows a bunch of Comcast junk as the sender. Pass. For some reason I don’t remember I could not get it to work well with Google;s servers either.

Well now I am running ClearOS 7, and the email seems to work flawlessly out of the box. I simply entered my Google mail settings (worked just fine with a Google Apps Domain) and hit the “Update and test” button – BAM! Email delivered. I am so happy right now.

There was one small catch, not any Gmail config worked. Here is what I used: Port 465 with SSL, 587 with TLS wouldn’t work for me. This was for ClearOS using Google SMTP servers with Comcast as the ISP.

Hard drive failure and adventures in ClearOS 7

I woke up Friday morning to the wife, “hey wake, the computer in the closet is making noises” (I have the server in the family room front entry closet with the door open). Oh great, fantastic way to wake up. Sure as shit it was making noises, zzzzzzzz-click zzzzzzz-click. Thing is toast. Good news or bad news first? Good? It was only a 160GB SATA 3GB/s drive nothing massive, and it was not the OS so the intarwebs and therefor our lives are all still functioning. The bad… it was a storage drive, a rather old storage drive – that was not backed up as it was rarely used. It contained all of our digital family pictures for the last 15 years. From the birth of our first daughter to the camping trip we had this last July. Gone. I never did like digital pictures.

In the wake of the disaster I ran out to Fry’s and purchased a replacement drive. Wow, drives are cheap now. I haven’t bought a hard drive in ages it seems. I was able to snag a 3TB 7200RPM SATA 6GB/s for $99 (without shopping around). 1TB drives as cheap as $40 bucks, damn! Even the 2TB hybrid-SSD drive was only $100 dollars.

Here is where the fun really begins. Since I had a shiny new, and massive, drive should I just do a fresh install and migrate to the new drive? Should I just toss it in as storage and rock on. Or, should I do a fresh install of ClearOS 7 that just recently dropped? I opted for a clean ClearOS 7 install. Sadly I feel it still hasn’t come very far from when I tried it back in Beta. It installed flawlessly this time and in a fairly decent amount of time. No issues with the quad-gigabit PCI-e network adapter which was nice. The thing that I noticed overall that worked out of the box with zero issues was the server sending email. My ISP blocks port 25 and I found ClearOS 6 to be a pain in the ass to get it to send mail, in fact I was unsuccessful in my attempts (I do not want to use my ISP as a relay). With 7 I was able to change the settings very easily to use GMail servers with no problems. However but it was not by any means a smooth configuration process. In fact I write this from my ClearOS 6.6 network, I booted back into the old drive (I didn’t wipe it!). I had nothing but problems trying to get Flexshares to work over the network, mainly because Samba was being a bitch. OpenLDAP and Samba were not playing nice. I am gathering from all the research and tweaking conf files that I installed some modules in an “incorrect” order. I found a post somewhere that mentioned the SMTP module was required to get Flexshares working 100%. WTF?

Anyways after some thinking I decided what I was going to do. I am currently transferring all my Plex media to the new 3TB drive where it will live. I am going to use one of the 80GBs as a torrent scratch disk (to prevent future catastrophes), and the other 80GB or 160GB as the new ClearOS 7 drive. Then I’ll migrate whats left to the 3TB for storage and wipe the other drives. Seven in all, about 5TB of space. I am thinking of playing with ClearOS 7 as a virtual box to get it right before getting dirty. I have one year before 6 goes EOL for support/updates. No problem.