On Friday they released a maintenance release of PHP. After installing this release everything was a total mess. Some pages took hours to load, others didn’t work as expected. After clueless hours of log file analysis and web research I downgraded to the stable Debian packages. Wonderful, everything’s back to normal. Let’s do it later.
Today G. called telling me she had problems to access webmail since Friday. She had tried to reach me serveral times during the weekend, but remember: I’m somewhat ill. O.K., I was a bit ill. Wait a minute. Logging into the webmail client. Shit. All my PEAR classes were totally broken. Didn’t PEAR require at least PHP 4.2.0*)? Hell no. I’ll sort this out tonight. Thank you, she said.
All right. Upgrading to PHP 4.3.10 tonight, regardless of any problems. Having a closer look for the last two hours. It was something with MySQL, especially something with mysql_fetch_assoc(). Again heavy research. Upgrading Zend Optimizer fixed the problem. Cool, dude, but not for me. I’m not using Zend Optimizer.
Finally I stumbled over a bug report. Would you please reset your locale to UTF8 and try again, the package maintainer asked. Wait! That was the solution.
4 hours research. 4 hours broken installation. Timeless efforts to downgrade. After isolating the problem it took less than 2 minutes to fix it. Oh, I love Linux. Oh, I love Linux so much.
*) Debian stable is something around 4.1.7
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