Is Blacknight totally beholden to Parallels for Linux shared hosting software updates

uglybunz

I've been using Blacknight for a few years now for some personal projects that I'd rather keep off my work servers, and I've always found you to be good, but I'm having a very negative experience with your support right now, trying to get one of your Linux shared hosting PHP modules brought a bit up to date (or even up to 2010).

I'm not going to go into all of the gory details here, but as an unix admin I'm getting frustrated by the vague excuses that I'm hearing, and I suspect that the module in question is likely to remain at 200x vintage despite my protestations.

So my question is in the title, is the module in question going to remain as it is until Parallels updates it, or is it something that Blacknight could do? If I'm expecting the impossible then I'll stop annoying your support, but my request/expectation is not unreasonable imo.

uglybunz

flamegrill

uglybunz wrote: »

I've been using Blacknight for a few years now for some personal projects that I'd rather keep off my work servers, and I've always found you to be good, but I'm having a very negative experience with your support right now, trying to get one of your Linux shared hosting PHP modules brought a bit up to date (or even up to 2010).

I'm not going to go into all of the gory details here, but as an unix admin I'm getting frustrated by the vague excuses that I'm hearing, and I suspect that the module in question is likely to remain at 200x vintage despite my protestations.

So my question is in the title, is the module in question going to remain as it is until Parallels updates it, or is it something that Blacknight could do? If I'm expecting the impossible then I'll stop annoying your support, but my request/expectation is not unreasonable imo.

uglybunz

Hi There,

In our current shared hosting we can't change anything in PHP. In an up coming release of Parallels platform we'll be able to use Cloudlinux's alt-php which will give us 5.3.27, 5.4.17 and 5.5.0. And since we'll be using Cloudlinux we can actually change things. Parallels currently provide all the builds so we don't have control over them.

I do note that PDO supports SQLite, SQLite2 but not SQLite3 on our platform at the moment. We do however have SQLite3 support compiled into PHP but it's not via PDO unfortunately.

Just a look on a cloudlinux box with the alt versions of php I see the same driver version as our own.

pdo_sqlite

PDO Driver for SQLite 3.x => enabled
SQLite Library => 3.3.6

I'll ping Igor in Cloudlinux and ask him about that...

Paul

uglybunz

Hi Paul,

What you're saying is not strictly correct, your PDO SQLite module does support SQLite 3, but it's linked against SQLite 3.3.6, which is a rather vintage version, and my application requires at least 3.3.7, which was released in 2006.

I suspect that some confusion is being caused by the fact that now that SQLite 2 is obsolete, SQLite 3 is called SQLite - the original SQLite 1 is long gone, but you can see that it's SQLite 3 from its version number.

If I look on my own servers I see:
PDO module: php53-pdo_sqlite-5.3.27

and:
PDO Driver for SQLite 3.x => enabled
SQLite Library => 3.7.17

These are both the latest versions of PHP 5.3 and SQLite (formerly SQLite 3), which I guess is why this experience is so frustrating for me.

Most of your users will not thank you for PHP 5.4 or greater, as these versions have become very strict and will generate notices, warnings and errors where there were none under PHP 5.3. So I do understand/appreciate your caution in applying updates!

Might I suggest that you indicate to Parallels that their Linux configuration creates a nasty regression trap for its users that they should address?

Here it is:

• Many PHP applications are moving from using the old PHP database modules to using PDO modules, as they provide database agnosticism (PDO looks after the individual database SQL implementations).
• Parallels Linux PHP SQLite3 module is linked against SQLite 3.6.23.1 (a newer version).
• Parallels Linux PHP PDO SQLite module is linked against SQLite 3.6.6 (an older version).
• In the event of a PHP application being upgraded from a version that uses the SQLite3 module to one that uses the PDO SQLite module, then this introduces a SQLite regression, to an older version.
• Both modules should be linked against the same SQLite library. The Parallels configuration is currently sub-optimal.

I can't see how they could argue that this should not be addressed.

It sounds like Cloudlinux might be presenting a similar trap, but I haven't looked at it. Do you have an ETA for the new system?

Thanks, uglybunz

flamegrill

uglybunz wrote: »

Hi Paul,

What you're saying is not strictly correct, your PDO SQLite module does support SQLite 3, but it's linked against SQLite 3.3.6, which is a rather vintage version, and my application requires at least 3.3.7, which was released in 2006.

I suspect that some confusion is being caused by the fact that now that SQLite 2 is obsolete, SQLite 3 is called SQLite - the original SQLite 1 is long gone, but you can see that it's SQLite 3 from its version number.

If I look on my own servers I see:
PDO module: php53-pdo_sqlite-5.3.27

and:
PDO Driver for SQLite 3.x => enabled
SQLite Library => 3.7.17

These are both the latest versions of PHP 5.3 and SQLite (formerly SQLite 3), which I guess is why this experience is so frustrating for me.

Most of your users will not thank you for PHP 5.4 or greater, as these versions have become very strict and will generate notices, warnings and errors where there were none under PHP 5.3. So I do understand/appreciate your caution in applying updates!

Might I suggest that you indicate to Parallels that their Linux configuration creates a nasty regression trap for its users that they should address?

Here it is:

Many PHP applications are moving from using the old PHP database modules to using PDO modules, as they provide database agnosticism (PDO looks after the individual database SQL implementations).
Parallels Linux PHP SQLite3 module is linked against SQLite 3.6.23.1 (a newer version).
Parallels Linux PHP PDO SQLite module is linked against SQLite 3.6.6 (an older version).
In the event of a PHP application being upgraded from a version that uses the SQLite3 module to one that uses the PDO SQLite module, then this introduces a SQLite regression, to an older version.
Both modules should be linked against the same SQLite library. The Parallels configuration is currently sub-optimal.


I can't see how they could argue that this should not be addressed.

It sounds like Cloudlinux might be presenting a similar trap, but I haven't looked at it. Do you have an ETA for the new system?

Thanks, uglybunz

Cloudlinux, CentOS, RHEL etc are all binary compatible. The SQLite library shipped with RHEL5 is 3.3.6.

Most likely in CentOS/RHEL/Cloudlinux version 6 the library is much newer. We can't really about meddling with system libraries that other software is provided to us from Redhat etc that depend on specific versions.

Debian/Ubuntu probably have much newer versions of these but we don't use those and most major control panels don't support them. Parallels will support Cloudlinux 6 at the same time as their alt-php support so in theory we might be able to offer a newer SQLite but I can't say for sure.

Timelines on this are not clear. Currently the product version 5.5 was RTM'd last Friday so we should see it sometime in the next 6-8 weeks and after this we'll be able to offer more flexible PHP configurations. One caveat though, we'll only be able to offer this on new plans that sign up after a certain date due to the fact that migrating 100s of servers to Cloudlinux isn't really on the cards.

Good news for you is that have a migration path from old CentOS 5 hosting to Cloudlinux hosting servers subscription by subscription so it'll be possible however I can't give exact time lines for any of this at the moment.

Regards,

Paul

uglybunz

Thanks for the update. What I really don't understand is that if CentOS/RHEL/Cloudlinux 5 ship with SQLite 3.3.6, how is it that the PHP SQLite3 module is linked against a newer library? This makes no sense to me, and is a misconfiguration.

I guess I'll just have to set up my embedded application on the AWS free tier for now, but I was hoping to not have to manage a server!

I'll leave your Blacknight support-droids in peace for now  

Cheers, uglybunz