Latest updates in testing

The following packages are in testing, and available for download in the testing repositories:

  • php70w 7.0.19-1
  • php71w 7.1.5-1

Assuming you have the Webtatic repositories set up (see Yum Repository), you can update using:

yum update <package> --enablerepo=webtatic-testing

Latest updates in testing

The following packages are in testing, and available for download in the testing repositories:

  • mysql 5.5.55-1 (el6 only)
  • nginx1w 1.12.0 (el7 only)
  • php56w-pecl-mongodb 1.2.8-1
  • php56w-pecl-redis 3.1.2-1
  • php56w-pecl-xdebug 2.5.3-1
  • php70w-pecl-apcu 5.1.8-1
  • php70w-pecl-memcached 3.0.3-1
  • php70w-pecl-mongodb 1.2.8-1
  • php70w-pecl-redis 3.1.2-1
  • php70w-pecl-xdebug 2.5.3-1
  • php71w-pecl-apcu 5.1.8-1
  • php71w-pecl-memcached 3.0.3-1
  • php71w-pecl-mongodb 1.2.8-1
  • php71w-pecl-redis 3.1.2-1
  • php71w-pecl-xdebug 2.5.3-1

Assuming you have the Webtatic repositories set up (see Yum Repository), you can update using:

yum update <package> --enablerepo=webtatic-testing

New website

Due to the recent Cloudflare issue causing Russian users to be blocked, Webtatic is now using DNS load-balancing to serve a static website from the fastest latency available location Webtatic servers to the visitor.

Previously the website was using Wordpress along with WP-Super-Cache preload to generate a static website with some dynamic functionality. It’s now instead generated using Hugo (a static website generator). This nicely changed the generation from taking 10 minutes to 1 second.

RSS/Atom feeds are still available for the news section, categories and tags, redirecting from Wordpress’s feed urls to Hugo’s generated ones, however more advanced feeds that combine multiple tags into one feed are no longer available.

Comments, which were previously used to submit feedback, are no longer possible due to this change, however the package pages link now to the Github repository for each package, and you can use the Github Issues functionality to raise issues relating to the packages.

Russia blocked access (indirectly), now fixed

Late last month, Russia started blocking Webtatic.com indirectly because of a unaffiliated online currency website serving from the same IP address.

This affected the webtatic.com and mirror.webtatic.com websites.

This was due to Cloudflare (a CDN service), which both this and that online currency website were using, sharing IP addresses across it’s Free and Professional subscriptions between clients. A blanket ban was applied to the IP address to block the offending website.

Sadly Cloudflare were unable to solve the issue, and Webtatic was unable to get new unblocked IP addresses from them.

Due to this, Webtatic is no longer using the Cloudflare CDN, and will instead transition to hosting the website in multiple data centres (as the yum repositories also currently do).

Latest updates in testing

The following packages are in testing, and available for download in the testing repositories:

  • php71w 7.1.3-1
  • php70w 7.0.17-1

Assuming you have the Webtatic repositories set up (see Yum Repository), you can update using:

yum update <package> --enablerepo=webtatic-testing

New Package Nginx 1.10 (nginx1w)

Webtatic has now released Nginx 1.10.3 for RHEL/CentOS 7.3 as a new set of packages and dynamic modules, including pagespeed and headers_more. Significantly it also will support both SPDY 3.1 and HTTP2 (although the latter browsers wont use until a future release of RHEL 7.4).

This release will, unlike Webtatic's previous Nginx releases, follow all Nginx 1 stable minor releases, rather than just bugfix releases. (So for example if Nginx 1.12 is released, these packages will upgrade to that).

Continuing Nginx with the release of 1.10 with SPDY removed and HTTP2 added in gave a complex non-backwards compatible change:
* SPDY removed, so for example older Android devices could no longer benefit from the performance improvements.
* HTTP2 added, however RHEL/CentOS 6 and 7's openssl doesn't yet support the TLS ALPN extension to negotiate http protocol version. This means newer and newest browsers can't yet benefit from HTTP2 on this OS distribution.

For the former, Webtatic has reintroduced SPDY using patches Cloudflare created to add it to their own Nginx servers. Cloudflare provides the patch open source. It may be removed from Webtatic's releases later (e.g. if it becomes unmaintained).

For the latter, Webtatic aims to resolve as soon as an official RHEL/CentOS openssl upgrade becomes available and supported by them. Redhat are planning to do this as part of their RHEL 7.4 release, but this may be released. between half a year to a year from now.

Given Redhat has no plans to provide an openssl upgrade for RHEL/CentOS 6, Webtatic will no longer provide Nginx releases for that distro version.

Latest updates in testing

The following packages are in testing, and available for download in the testing repositories:

  • php71w 7.1.2-1
  • php71w-pecl-imagick-3.4.3-1
  • php70w 7.0.16-1
  • php70w-pecl-imagick-3.4.3-1
  • php56w-pecl-imagick-3.4.3-1

Assuming you have the Webtatic repositories set up (see Yum Repository), you can update using:

    yum update <package> --enablerepo=webtatic-testing