This has been upgrade weekend here at Reinvented:

• I upgraded the Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the main server (you’re looking at it) version 3 to version 4. I’d waited a long time to do this, mostly because the upgrade path seemed foggy; turns out that it isn’t all that foggy — the RHEL 4 install CDs have an “ugprade” mode that did all the heavy lifting. The only thing I needed to do was install the compat-libcom_err-1.0-5.i386 package from the RedHat Network to fix some application breakage.
• I took the opportunity to upgrade to PHP5. I’d been running PHP4 for what seem like forever, and it seemed like a good idea to join the object generation. Again, I’d held off because I feared incompatibility, but I haven’t found any yet, and the combo Apache 2 + PHP5 compile install goes exactly like the PHP4 compile and install. I’m crossing my fingers that this doesn’t cause any problems, and I’m looking forward to taking PHP5 for a ride.
• Because Asterisk, which runs the phone system here in the office, has to be recompiled when the kernel changes anyway, I decided to upgrade to Asterisk 1.2.2 as well. I ran into some post-RHEL4-upgrade problems here, problems solved by:
  • Installing the kernel-devel-2.6.9-22.0.2.EL.i686.rpm package.
  • cd /usr/src
  • ln -s /usr/src/kernels/2.6.9-22.0.2.EL-i686 linux
  • ln -s /usr/src/linux /lib/modules/2.6.9-22.0.2.EL-i686/build
  After doing that, Asterisk compiled and installed without problems. To get things working, I also had to follow the instructions here about making the swtich from devfs to udev.
• The third-party Asterisk application app_notify needed to have a #include <stdio.h> inserted into app_notify.c before #include <asterisk/file.h> — after that change, it compiled fine.
• I resisted the temptation to upgrade to MySQL 5 as part of all this — why tempt fate. I’ll get around to that next time I’ve got a free Sunday afternoon.

As a result of all this, if you notice that the blog is appearing in Russian or emitting strange siren-like noises, please let me know.