I was feeling productive making serious strides gettinng my c7000 chassis

I was feeling productive today making serious strides getting my c7000 chassis ready and reached a great stopping point when I decided to do a small task that lead to several updates and took parts of my web site down. I was just going to link another blog’s post to one of mine to increase traffic to both sites hopefully when I decided to update to see if I had access to a better plugin to link related sites since the one I used extensively no longer had active development and the other one I didn’t have time to dive into today.

First I wanted to update to the latest version of WordPress 5.23 but the update check discovered I had PHP version 5.4.16 and I needed to be at PhP 5.5 to get to WordPress 3.23 the latest version.

First I did a full OS update on my web server I host WordPress on which is Centos 7 OS to see if it picked up the latest PHP version and it didn’t update PHP at all during the update process. The kernel and quite a few other files updated seamlessly though.

Second I updated WordPress to the latest verions I could with PHP 5.4.16 which was version 5.14 of WordPress. I then did minimal poking around and determined that of course WordPress 5.23 would work with the latest version of PHP so I decided to see why Centos 7 didn’t update to the latest version of PHP during the update process.

Found out how to get to the latest version of PHP 7.3 and it was straightforward, so I decided to do it. I found several sites with the same update procedure so I followed the one at Digital Ocean since they always have to have good material:

Install EPEL yum repository on your system

yum install epel-release

Install Remi repository

rpm -Uvh http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-7.rpm

Now onto the proper installation

Your system is prepared for the PHP installation from yum repositories. Use one of the following commands to install PHP 7.3 or PHP 7.2 or PHP 7.1 on your system based on your requirements

## Install PHP 7.3  yum --enablerepo=remi-php73 install php

All seemed to go smooth so I then decided to update to WordPress 5.23 and then updated all of my plugins and all my WordPress themes except for the theme I use for my Music Streaming site “Snakeice’s House of Beats” since there were some customizations I didn’t want to work with today and it is only one version behind the latest version on that active theme. All looked good as I updated each site which in turn updated the database.

I then went to the Music Streaming site “Snakeice’s House of Beats” and could not see the now playing information so I started thinking the iFrame plugin I used had failed. I looked at the settings and they were blank! Was glad I was looking at the wrong site, I then checked the correct site with an independent tool to see if my site had picked up something during the updates that would block iframes and it tested out fine.

Then it dawned on me to test the content I show within my iFrame outside of the iFrame and it wouldn’t come up! Now I went to my request site and requested a song and that gave database errors! I had failed to consider that the PHP based code of that part of the site which stands on its own if needed didn’t have the proper PHP updates and that site doesn’t have simple update processes for me it would be all manual if that’s the issue.

I looked in the Apache/httpd log files and of course there was the error “PHP Parse error: Invalid numeric literal”. Then went to the site of that application’s forum to see who else ran into this issue and I found the fix was the latest version of the SAM Broadcaster applications PHP templates. I purchased the update installed the new templates in another part of my site after getting that installed on my W2012-r2 site and copying the templates from there. I mad my configuration changes to point to my streaming music server and to sync with that database put in my station credentials and everything didn’t work perfectly. I even noticed the Joomla portion on my site had all types of PHP errors all over the place what a mess!

Heck even the update of the SAM Broadcaster application on my W2012-r2 server didn’t go smoothly. That took me 3 tries with running the executable as Administrator user and moving files and making sure I killed certain processes before it recognized the new SAM Broadcaster version 2018-10!

Now I ventured over to the SAM forums again and found that one of the people who did SAM Broadcaster consulting work had packaged up some changes for the SAM Broadcaster files for PHP 7.x he had supposedly passed on to the team at Spacial Audio who created SAM Broadcaster and should have been in the latest version of SAM. I downloaded that zip package, moved it to my web server, unzipped it, copied what had been my working code to a renamed directory and then copied the changed files over my previously working files. I then looked at my music standalone site and it looked horrible but a change had occurred that looked like something I could work with!

After copying all the unzipped files over my prior working site I then made changes to my configuration API files pointing to my database, syncing to the W2012-r2 server that streams the music from my Centos 7 web server and refreshing the web page after each change and it got me back up to where I was except of course my Joomla CMS pages which I will tackle the next couple of days.

After all of that I decided to link the other blog’s post to my related post on mint plants and ended up doing it manually since the plugin I wanted and I updated to use didn’t work! Wow well at least I got somethings updated with more secure code and those blog posts linked! I’ll tackle everything else later, I have several dozens projects left to do after being overseas for a while on my systems around the house and community but I’m at the latest version of Centos 7, PHP (7.3), SAM Broadcaster and Windows 2012-r2 (I updated a couple of days ago) and made significant progress installing to server blades and setting up things on my c7000 blade chassis.