Webtatic.com

New repositories were created a month ago to store old versions of packages that were in the EL5.1 and EL6 repositories, where newer versions are kept. Today, the old versions of these packages have been moved to these new archive repositories.

If you have installed the latest.rpm recently, you will already have configured access to these archive repositories, but otherwise you can get access by repeating installation of the repository version you are using, see the Yum Repository page for details on how to install this.

Archived versions of packages will instead now be accessible for installation via:

yum install package-name.version --enablerepo=webtatic-archive

If you do use the archived packages, please note that using them there may be bugs and security issues that have since been fixed in the latest version of the packages, so if you can avoid it, you should only use the standard repositories.

This separation will mean that the package metadata for the existing EL5.1 and EL6 repositories will be reduced in size now, and mirroring should by default only sync the latest packages. It is standard practice in Yum repositories to delete or archive old versions of packages, Webtatic has taken the latter approach so that if it's critical to you to stay on the old versions, you can still do that.

Here are updated packages in the Yum repository:

• PHP 5.5.1 for RHEL/CentOS 5/6 changelog
• PHP 5.4.17 for RHEL/CentOS 5/6 changelog

The PHP 5.5 and 5.4 releases addresses a CVE, CVE-2013-4113. The CVE and changelogs do not mention PHP 5.5.0 and 5.4.0 - 5.4.17 versions are affected, however they are and the security fix is in PHP.net's 5.5.1 version, and will be in their next PHP 5.4 release (5.4.18).

Webtatic has included the pending PHP 5.4.18 security fix for this in it's php54w*-5.4.17 release, so although PHP 5.4.18 will likely be released on PHP.net within the week addressing this issue, it will not be as urgent to upgrade if using php54w*-5.4.17.

Additionally, there have been the following improvements added to the Webtatic PHP releases:

• Zend Thread Safety (ZTS) mod_php module is now bundled with the standard mod_php module (non-ZTS), and will only be enabled if switching httpd prefork MPM to the worker MPM. All PHP extensions included in the repository will install standard extensions and ZTS extensions by default, and depending on the mod_php version being used, use the appropriate extensions in /etc/php.d (non-ZTS) and /etc/php-zts.d (ZTS).
• Mysqlnd is supplied as alternative additional package to php54w-mysql/php55w-mysql (using the system libmysqlclient), and will replace the alternative php54w-mysql55/php55w-mysql55 (using Mysql 5.5 libmysqlclient).
• Several built-in PHP extensions are now shared extensions, so they can be disabled by removing the appropriate /etc/php.d/*.ini and /etc/php-zts.d/*.ini files

Here are updated packages in the Yum repository:

• PHP 5.3.27 for RHEL/CentOS 5 changelog

The PHP 5.3 release addresses a CVE, CVE-2013-4113.

PHP 5.4.17 does not mention this CVE, so there is no urgency to upgrade to this if you are on 5.4.16, however Webtatic is preparing it at the moment with a few package improvements that will be released soon.

Here are updated packages in the Yum repository:

• PHP 5.5.0 for CentOS/RHEL 6.4 and 5.9 changelog

The PHP 5.5.0 release is out now for CentOS/RHEL 5 on the Webtatic Yum repository as well as CentOS/RHEL 6. It took a little longer to prepare the EL5 version due to resolving ICU requirements, as PHP 5.5 only supports ICU >= 4.0. There is a new set of packages icu42 / libicu42 now included for this.

Here are updated packages in the Yum repository:

• PHP 5.5.0 for CentOS/RHEL 6.4 changelog

The PHP 5.5.0 release is out now for CentOS/RHEL 6 on the Webtatic Yum repository. More information can be found at PHP 5.5 for CentOS 6.4 via yum. The packages have been in testing since the PHP 5.5.0alpha2 release.

PHP.net has also announced that PHP 5.3 will only be receiving critical fixes from now on. Webtatic will continue to provide any of these fixes for CentOS 5.

Here are updated packages in the Yum repository:

• PHP 5.3.26 for RHEL/CentOS 5 changelog
• PHP 5.4.16 for RHEL/CentOS 5/6 changelog

The PHP 5.3 and 5.4 releases address a CVE, CVE-2013-2110.

Here are updated packages in the Yum repository:

• PHP 5.4.15 (php54w) for CentOS 5
• Xdebug 2.2.3 (php54w-pecl-xdebug package) for PHP 5.4 on CentOS/RHEL 5/6 changelog
• Nginx 1.2.9 for CentOS 5

When the Webtatic EL6 repository was being created, I chose to change the format of the repository so that it would no longer use the same package names as CentOS/RHEL base repositories. This is because the previous Webtatic 5 repository had be installed with enabled=0 to avoid accidental unwanted upgrades, and the new structure meant that Webtatic EL6 could be enabled by default.

This has now been rolled out for CentOS/RHEL 5.x with the new Webtatic EL5.1 repository. The new repository can still be used in conjunction with Webtatic 5 repository.

The Webtatic 5 repository (the older one), will still be maintained, including updates to existing packages, but any new packages will be placed in Webtatic EL5.1

With this change, Webtatic will now support PHP 5.4 packages on CentOS/RHEL 5, using the php54w naming used in Webtatic EL6. Along with this, Nginx 1.2 is also available, along with existing MySQL 5.5 and 5.1 packages.

The guides on the website have been updated to reflect these changes.

Here are updated packages in the Yum repository:

• Nginx 1.2.9 update for CentOS 6
• Zend OPcache 7.0.1 (php54w-pecl-zendopcache package) for PHP 5.4 on CentOS 6 changelog
• Memcache 3.0.8 (php54w-pecl-memcache package) for PHP 5.4 on CentOS 6 changelog
• Xdebug 2.2.2 (php54w-pecl-xdebug package) for PHP 5.4 on CentOS 6 changelog

The Nginx 1.2 release contains a security fix for CVE-2013-2070.

The Zend OPcache is Zend's now open-source Zend Optimizer Plus opcode cache, which is a Pecl extension now, and will also be bundled with the next PHP minor release 5.5.

The PHP extension updates are to put the extensions in line for the future release of PHP 5.5 on Webtatic, which is in the works for when it is released on PHP.net

No data-centre can truly say they can guarantee infrastructure with 100% uptime, and neither can the one Webtatic has been hosted on, so the Webtatic repository is now going multi-data-centre and multi-region, giving it the possibility of being up and running even if one data-centre has issues.

Previously, Webtatic has been hosted in a single data-centre in east USA, with a backup AWS S3 bucket ready to serve on manual intervention. This I feel hasn't been adequate enough, so the last week I've been preparing changes to the repository so that even if a data-centre has connectivity issues, this should not affect your use of the repository.

The new changes bring in an additional mirror of the repository active all the time, which Yum will chose as another source for the repository.

So now we have:
http://us-east.repo.webtatic.com/ - the existing instance, still accessible from http://repo.webtatic.com/
http://uk.repo.webtatic.com/ - the new mirror, hosted in the UK
http://mirror.webtatic.com/ - the source for the mirrorlist and latest.rpm, located on AWS S3

What's more, with the Yum plugin 'fastestmirror' (which usually is pre-installed on RHEL/CentOS), wherever you are in the world, you'll get the best one of the two in your location.

All you need to do is upgrade to the latest webtatic-release, which can be done simply:

Webtatic 5 for RHEL/CentOS 5:

rpm -Uvh http://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/centos/5/latest.rpm

Webtatic el6 for RHEL/CentOS 6:

rpm -Uvh http://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el6/latest.rpm

The www.webtatic.com website is not yet multi-region, however this will be looked into in the next few weeks.

Here are updated packages in the Yum repository:

• PHP 5.3.25 for CentOS 5 changelog
• PHP 5.4.15 for CentOS 6 changelog

The PHP 5.3 and 5.4 releases mention no CVE security issues fixed.