Dan Field has a new post to his blog today about deploying PHP applications "The Red Hat Way" - as a single RPM package that can be dropped into any RedHat system and installed easily.

Red Hat is one of the largest Linux distributions in the enterprise market and there are a multitude of other RPM based distributions such as CentOS, Fedora, Mandriva, SuSE. Many people are deploying their web projects into RPM based environments and it makes a lot of sense to try to do things the "Red Hat Way". This post deals with introducing the Red Hat filesystem layout and automatically deploying a web application into it with the RPM package management tool and a YUM repository.

He shows how to build the configuration files, making a build properties file, creating the Apache configuration, setting up a config for the VirtualHost to be added to the Apache install and finally, building the tarball package and making it into an RPM.

Clay Loveless has some great news for those running RedHat-based versions of linux - PHP 5.3 can now be installed via yum.

Ever been frustrated that the latest this-or-that package for PHP is bogged down in Big Distro Packaging politics? I have been. That’s why I've put together a deliberately-current-as-possible repository for PHP RPMs. The repository is currently i386-only, though I’ll be adding x86_64 packages within the next week or so. Also, "regular" and "debug" builds are available for all packages, so that users may be more helpful in troubleshooting what issues they find.

Its not an official package, but if you're wanting to get it installed without the hassle that can come with compiling, you can grab the package get coding.

Derick Rethans has a few choice words for those developing PHP packages for linux distributions out there - don't cripple PHP. His example deals specifically with RedHat and their choices on timezone management.

Red Hat thought it'd be wise to create a patch to use the system provided timezone database instead. We (the PHP development team) thought that to be a bad idea because of several reasons. Among them is that it removes control from PHP's users about which database is, decreased performance, and some missing functionality

He mentions other problems - other issues related to timezone support - that caused them to not accept RedHat's patch to try to "fix" things by disabling the bundled timezone database. He looks at why this is such a bad thing, why it can cause trouble with PHP's date handling and what the future holds for this database support (hint: PHP 5.3 will shake things up).

Rob Richards mentioned in a previous book review about some of the issues he was having getting the Oracle extension enabled on his Fedora 8 system. Well, he's come back after doing some more testing/compiling and has found some resolution to his issues.

I really didn't need to get it running, but the sheer fact that I tried it and it wouldn't work, pissed me off enough to spend some time getting it resolved. Hopefully this helps anyone else having the same problem. I am currently using instant client 11.1, but I did try the 10.2 version with the same results.

He steps through the process he followed - tracking down the missing libaio files, correcting an issue with SELinux loading the Oracle libraries and his realization: he just needed to allow text relocation. Included in the post are the command line calls that'd need to be made to make it all happen.

Rob Richards mentioned in a previous book review about some of the issues he was having getting the Oracle extension enabled on his Fedora 8 system. Well, he's come back after doing some more testing/compiling and has found some resolution to his issues.

I really didn't need to get it running, but the sheer fact that I tried it and it wouldn't work, pissed me off enough to spend some time getting it resolved. Hopefully this helps anyone else having the same problem. I am currently using instant client 11.1, but I did try the 10.2 version with the same results.

He steps through the process he followed - tracking down the missing libaio files, correcting an issue with SELinux loading the Oracle libraries and his realization: he just needed to allow text relocation. Included in the post are the command line calls that'd need to be made to make it all happen.

Christopher Jones has a (very) quick announcement about the latest builds of the PHP RPMs for Enterprise linux installations:

PHP 5.2.5 RPMs for x86 Enterprise Linux (i.e. RHEL) 4.6 and 5.1 are on http://oss.oracle.com/projects/php/. These are supplied "as is".

The RPMs are part of a project to provide support for Oracle Enterprise Linux servers (as well as Red Hat installs) and provide a PHP command line, CGI interface and an Apache module quickly and easily. Check out the project page to find out more and to grab this latest build.

Christopher Jones has a (very) quick announcement about the latest builds of the PHP RPMs for Enterprise linux installations:

PHP 5.2.5 RPMs for x86 Enterprise Linux (i.e. RHEL) 4.6 and 5.1 are on http://oss.oracle.com/projects/php/. These are supplied "as is".

The RPMs are part of a project to provide support for Oracle Enterprise Linux servers (as well as Red Hat installs) and provide a PHP command line, CGI interface and an Apache module quickly and easily. Check out the project page to find out more and to grab this latest build.

The Red Hat linux group has issued an update for their PHP packages today:

Red Hat has issued an update for php. This fixes some vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to bypass certain security restrictions and by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions and cause a DoS (Denial of Service).

You can get more information about this moderate level advisory from the Red Hat advisory including the affected products and the list of packages that should be updated to bring your installation up to date.

The Red Hat linux group has issued an update for their PHP packages today:

Red Hat has issued an update for php. This fixes some vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to bypass certain security restrictions and by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions and cause a DoS (Denial of Service).

You can get more information about this moderate level advisory from the Red Hat advisory including the affected products and the list of packages that should be updated to bring your installation up to date.

On the Secunia site today, there's a new advisory posted for users of Red Hat linux - an update to the system's PHP packages.

Red Hat has issued an update for php. This fixes some vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to bypass certain security restrictions and by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions and cause a DoS (Denial of Service).

The original advisory has more details on what the patch fixes and the checksum information for the update packages for all OSes.