[CentOS] httpd RPM newer than 2.0.63 avail for CentOS 4.x?

[John Hinton]

On 11/12/2010 3:44 PM, Philip Amadeo Saeli wrote:
> * Robert Heller<heller at deepsoft.com>  [2010-11-07 07:13:27 -0500]:
>> At Sun, 7 Nov 2010 00:17:31 -0500 CentOS mailing list<centos at centos.org>  wrote:
>>
>>> I'm maintaining an internet-facing web server which is now running httpd
>>> 2.0.63 (httpd-2.0.63-2.el4s1.centos.2) which is now neary 2.5 years
>>> old(!?!).  I need to move to either 2.0.64 or 2.2.12 or later.  However,
>>> I've been unable to find available RPMs for such releases for CentOS
>>> 4.x.
>>>
>>> I have to believe that others have these needs also.  In light of this,
>>> how do others keep up with security upgrades for the httpd?  I'm rather
>>> new to this aspect of things, so am still in the process of sorting
>>> things out in this regard.
>> Red Hat backports security updates (from newer versions).  So long as
>> you have been applying the standard O/S updates (eg 'yum update')
>> regularly, your http is up-to-date WRT security updates.
> This is true for vendor-supported version.  However, for technical
> reasons (i.e., need for additional features or capabilities), we are
> running versions more recent than the vendor-supported ones.  Up until
> recently, I have been able to obtain the needed versions (of, e.g.,
> httpd, mysql, and php) from available third-party CentOS repos.
> However, this is no longer the case.
>
> My question in this regard is to find out how this problem is generally
> handled by others.  I know anyone who has internet-facing, secure
> servers has to deal with these same issues.  Up until now, I've been
> able to trust that the community response would result in the needed
> RPMs showing up in public repos.  That model seems to now be broken (if
> indeed it was ever truly viable).
>
> In particular, I need the following package versions (for CentOS 4.x),
> none of which I've been able to locate in any publicly available repo:
>
>   1. httpd-2.0.64        # released: 2010-10-19
>   2. php-5.2.14          # released: 2010-07-22
>
> I have been able to locate packages for php-5.3.3 and am in the process
> of testing them.  However, things would be *much* simpler in the short
> term if we could move first to php-5.2.14.
>
> Our longer-range plan is to upgrade the server to CentOS 5, which will
> help quite a bit in this regard.  However, in the mean time I'm stuck
> with CentOS 4 on this server due to severe time, resource, and budget
> constraints.
Of note, RHEL 6 was released this week, so CentOS 6 will likely be out 
maybe around the end of the year. Also, the next version release for 
RHEL 5 has an option to move to PHP 5.3. It's coming soon. Your time 
restraints might allow you jump two major releases! ;)

As for the PHP upgrades. I don't know if you use SquirrelMail or not, 
but on a v5.x test machine, my upgrade to PHP 5.2 broke SquirrelMail. I 
didn't bother fixing it. I have recently upgraded that system to PHP 5.3 
from EPEL repository and SquirrelMail works again. That's the only thing 
I found that was broken... Just beware as it was a surprise to me.

John Hinton