Tag: Debian

Hi all

Recently, I helped one of my clients who was using an Amazon Lightsail WordPress instance provided by Bitnami. Bitnami is advantageous in that it provides a fully working stack, so you don’t have to worry about configuring LAMP or environments. You can find more information about the Bitnami Lightsail stack here.

However, the client’s stack was using the latest PHP 8.x version, while the WordPress site he runs uses several plugins that need PHP 7.4. I advised the client to consider upgrading the website to support the latest PHP versions. However, since that would require a lot of work, and he wanted the site to be up and running, he decided to downgrade PHP.

The issue with downgrading or upgrading PHP on a Bitnami stack is that it’s not possible. Bitnami recommends launching a new server instance with the required PHP, MySQL, or Apache version and migrating the data over. So, I decided to do it manually.

Here are the server details:

Debian 11
Current installed PHP: 8.1.x

Upgrading or downgrading PHP versions on a Bitnami stack is essentially the same as on a normal Linux server. In short, you need to:

Ensure the PHP packages for the version you want are installed.
Update any configuration for that PHP version.
Update your web server configuration to point to the correct PHP version.
Point PHP CLI to the correct PHP version.
Restart your web server and php-fpm.

What we did was install the PHP version provided by the OS. Then, we updated php.ini to use the non-default MySQL socket location used by the Bitnami server. We created a php-fpm pool that runs as the “daemon” user. After that, we updated the Apache configuration to use the new PHP version.

1. Make sure packages for your target version of PHP are installed
To make sure that the correct packages are available on your system for the PHP version you want, first make sure your system is up to date by running these commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
If it prompts you to do anything with config files, usually, you should just go with the default option and leave the current config as-is. Then, install the packages you need. For example, you can use the following command to install common PHP packages and modules:
sudo apt install -y php7.4-cli php7.4-dev php7.4-pgsql php7.4-sqlite3 php7.4-gd php7.4-curl php7.4-memcached php7.4-imap php7.4-mysql php7.4-mbstring php7.4-xml php7.4-imagick php7.4-zip php7.4-bcmath php7.4-soap php7.4-intl php7.4-readline php7.4-common php7.4-pspell php7.4-tidy php7.4-xmlrpc php7.4-xsl php7.4-fpm

2. Make sure PHP configuration for your target version is updated
Find the mysql socket path used by your Bitnami stack by running this command:

# ps aux | grep –color mysql.sock
mysql 7700 1.1 2.0 7179080 675928 ? Sl Mar21 11:21 /opt/bitnami/mariadb/sbin/mysqld –defaults-file=/opt/bitnami/mariadb/conf/my.cnf –basedir=/opt/bitnami/mariadb –datadir=/bitnami/mariadb/data –socket=/opt/bitnami/mariadb/tmp/mysql.sock –pid-file=/opt/bitnami/mariadb/tmp/mysqld.pid

Edit php.ini file

vi /etc/php/7.4/fpm/php.ini

Find

[Pdo_mysql]
; Default socket name for local MySQL connects. If empty, uses the built-in
; MySQL defaults.
pdo_mysql.default_socket=

Replace with

[Pdo_mysql]
; Default socket name for local MySQL connects. If empty, uses the built-in
; MySQL defaults.
pdo_mysql.default_socket= “/opt/bitnami/mariadb/tmp/mysql.sock”

Find

mysqli.default_socket =

Replace with

mysqli.default_socket = “/opt/bitnami/mariadb/tmp/mysql.sock”

Create a php-fpm pool file

vi /etc/php/8.1/fpm/pool.d/wp.conf

[wordpress]
env[PATH] = $PATH
listen=/opt/bitnami/php/var/run/www2.sock
user=daemon
group=daemon
listen.owner=daemon
listen.group=daemon
pm=dynamic
pm.max_children=400
pm.start_servers=260
pm.min_spare_servers=260
pm.max_spare_servers=300
pm.max_requests=5000

Feel free to adjust the PHP FPM settings to match your server specifications or needs. Check out this informative article for more tips on optimizing PHP FPM performance. Just keep in mind that Bitnami configures their stack with the listen.owner and listen.group settings set to daemon.

This pool will listen on unix socket “/opt/bitnami/php/var/run/www2.sock”.

Enable and restart PHP 8.1 fpm service

systemctl enable php7.4-fpm
systemctl restart php7.4-fpm

3. Update your web server configuration to point to the correct PHP version

Edit file

vi /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/bitnami/php-fpm.conf

For some installations, file is located at

vi /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/php-fpm-apache.conf

Inside you file find

SetHandler “proxy:fcgi://www-fpm”

Find and replace www.sock with www2.sock

4. Make sure PHP-CLI points to the right PHP version

Rename the default PHP installed by bitnami.

mv /opt/bitnami/php/bin/php /opt/bitnami/php/bin/php_8.1_bitnami.

create a symlink from newly installed PHP 7.4

ln -s /usr/bin/php7.4 /opt/bitnami/php/bin/php

Test the installed version by running below command
~# php -v
PHP 7.4.33 (cli) (built: Feb 22 2023 20:07:47) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.4.0, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
with Zend OPcache v7.4.33, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies

5. Restart PHP-FPM and your webserver

sudo systemctl restart php7.4-fpm; sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache

Run Postfix on multiple ports

By Murshida KV

On November 18, 2015

In Linux server, Postfix

Adding additional SMTP listenerports

By default postfix run on port 25 and 587(TLS). However some ISPs block port 25. In that case you can configure the postfix mail server to listen on addional ports too, for example port 26 or some random 5125.

This configuration is done in the master.cf configuration file. Edit it in your editor of choice.

This file is in the following format:

# ========================================================================== # service type private unpriv chroot wakeup maxproc command + args # (yes) (yes) (yes) (never) (100) # ==========================================================================

The first column is the port number that you want to listen on. The default SMTP port 25 line will read as follows:

smtp inet n - - - - smtpd

To add an additional listener port of 5125, insert the the following after the above:

5125 inet n - n - - smtpd

Save the file and restart postfix service

service postfix restart

Now you can use port 25, 587 and 5125 to connect to your mail server.

Apache: Multiple SSL websites on a single IP address

By wahab

On July 2, 2013

In Cpanel and WHM, Linux server, Plesk

Apache: Multiple SSL websites on a single IP address

Update: This is a new update from a cPanel Tech
“There is nothing to enable. As long as you are using cPanel & WHM version 11.38 on CentOS, RHEL, or CloudLinux version 6 or newer, SNI works out of the box”.

One of the frustrating limitations in supporting secure websites has been the inability to share IP addresses among SSL websites.
When website administrators and IT personnel are restricted to use a single SSL Certificate per socket (combination of IP Address and socket) it can cost a lot of money. Well we can actually share IP addresses for multiple secure websites. Solving this limitation required an extension to the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol that includes the addition of what hostname a client is connecting to when a handshake is initiated with a web server. The name of the extension is Server Name Indication (SNI). SNI is supported in Apache v2.2.12 , and OpenSSL v0.9.8j or later.

With SNI, you can have many virtual hosts sharing the same IP address and port, and each one can have its own unique certificate

Prerequisites to use SNI

Use OpenSSL 0.9.8f or later
Build OpenSSL with the TLS Extensions option enabled (option enable-tlsext; OpenSSL 0.9.8k and later has this enabled by default).
Apache must have been built with that OpenSSL (./configure –with-ssl=/path/to/your/openssl). In that case, mod_ssl will automatically detect the availability of the TLS extensions and support SNI.
Apache must use that OpenSSL at run-time, which might require setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH or equivalent to point to that OpenSSL, maybe in bin/envvars. (You’ll get unresolved symbol errors at Apache startup if Apache was built with SNI but isn’t finding the right openssl libraries at run-time.)

Setting up SNI with Apache

The configuration is pretty simple and straight forward, though I recommend making a backup of your existing httpd.conf file before proceeding.

# Ensure that Apache listens on port 443
Listen 443

# Listen for virtual host requests on all IP addresses
NameVirtualHost *:443

# Go ahead and accept connections for these vhosts
# from non-SNI clients
SSLStrictSNIVHostCheck off

# Because this virtual host is defined first, it will
# be used as the default if the hostname is not received
# in the SSL handshake, e.g. if the browser doesn't support
# SNI.
DocumentRoot /www/example2
ServerName www.linuxwebhostingsupport.in

# Other directives here
SSLEngine On
SSLCertificateFile /path/to/linuxwebhostingsupport.in.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /path/to/linuxwebhostingsupport.in.key
SSLCertificateChainFile /path/to/CA.crt

DocumentRoot /www/example2
ServerName www.abdulwahabmp.co.in

# Other directives here
SSLEngine On
SSLCertificateFile /path/to/abdulwahabmp.co.in.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /path/to/abdulwahabmp.co.in.key
SSLCertificateChainFile /path/to/CA.crt

That it!!!. Just restart APache service. Now go and check your Websites using https. That should be working.

Plesk support SNI from 10.2.x version onwards.

SNI will work on following Operating systems out of box

OpenSuSE Linux 11.3 or later.
Ubuntu Linux 10.4 or later.
Debian Linux 6.0 or later.
RedHat Linux 6.0 or later.
CentOS Linux 60.0 or later

Supported Desktop Browsers
Internet Explorer 7 and later
Firefox 2 and later
Opera 8 with TLS 1.1 enabled
Google Chrome:
Supported on Windows XP on Chrome 6 and later
Supported on Vista and later by default
OS X 10.5.7 in Chrome Version 5.0.342.0 and later
Chromium 11.0.696.28 and later
Safari 2.1 and later (requires OS X 10.5.6 and later or Windows Vista and later).
Note: No versions of Internet Explorer on Windows XP support SNI

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Tag: Debian

Downgrading PHP Version on Bitnami WordPress in AWS Lightsail instance

Run Postfix on multiple ports

Apache: Multiple SSL websites on a single IP address