Confixx upgrade 3.3.6 -> 3.3.8: Some notes

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on July 29th 2011 - Listed in Linux PHP

Before I begin: It's the last Friday in July. This means: HAPPY SYSADMIN DAY!!!

I recently made an update of Confixx from version 3.3.6 to 3.3.8. Besides the bugfixes and new features you can find on the release notes page, there are some other small things to be aware of:

Config files in /etc:

• /etc/apache2/confixx_mhost.conf has some new error reporting entries.
• /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf was overwritten by the Confixx upgrade script. Watch carefully for that file, create a backup before (usually the upgrade script should create a backup called proftpd.conf.confixx-backup).
  
• /etc/ssl.key/www.servername.key was overwritten by the Confixx upgrade script.
• /etc/ssl.crt/www.servername.crt  was overwritten by the Confixx upgrade script.
  

New language texts in Confixx UI:

• user.inc.php:
  $lang_text['spam_error4']
  $lang_text['wbm_sendmail_invalidname']
  $lang_text['wbm_sendmail_invalidhyphen']
  
  
• admin.inc.php:
  $lang_text['eiipau2_error7']
  

The biggest changes to the language files were done by renaming POP3 Boxes to Mailboxes.

.htaccess files in user www modified (!)

Yes, this is something I didn't like at all. If a user has used features which require .htaccess (like error pages, password auth, etc), the existing .htaccess file was replaced with only the data from Confixx. If a user has manually added stuff like rewrite rules, these are removed from the .htaccess file.

Instead Confixx made a backup like this:

-rw-r--r--  1 root root       66 2011-07-29 14:25 .htaccess
-rw-r--r--  1 root root      292 2011-07-29 14:24 .htaccess_beforeupdate

And another thing which I didn't like at all: Instead of using the user's username and group (e.g. web15), the upgrade script placed the .htaccess as root.

PHP 5.3 compatibility (?)

On the Parallels website there is a knowledge base entry which states that Confixx 3.3.6 and lower does not support PHP 5.3. So Confixx 3.3.8 should support it. However, as one can clearly see, there are still old ways of handling variables used in the Confixx code. Example:

ftplogin/auth.php:21:   }elseif( is_array( $HTTP_GET_VARS ) ){

Such old $HTTP_GET_VARS code requires register_long_arrays in the PHP configuration, which, as of PHP 5.3, is deprecated. So this setting still needs to be enabled if one wants to use Confixx with PHP 5.3.

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