End of MySQL old password support

Posted on Friday 4 October 2019, at 18:08 UTC

MySQL old password support (before MySQL 4.1) backward compatibility is being removed from most MySQL client libraries, at least from the PHP MySQL client library we started using.

MySQL new password support (starting from MySQL 4.1) is quite old, that is, affected databases are those created before 2006 and without a single password change since then, needless to say that only a few of them are affected.

Anyway, we manually renewed a couple of password hash on websites filling a MySQL auth error "The server requested authentication method unknown to the client [mysql_old_password]" in our error log but we can't do much for websites that don't.

Please renew your MySQL database password using the panel if you encounter the issue.

Switch from PHP5 to PHP7 planned

Posted on Tuesday 6 August 2019, at 13:36 UTC

As most of you know, PHP7 is available for a couple of years now, and more and more CMS and such are removing their backward compatibility with PHP5 up to the point that we now really need to upgrade.

We can't easily keep both installed, PHP5 is available up to Debian Jessie (8) and PHP7 support is available from Debian Stretch (9), therefore we have to do a hard change.

This really is going to break things a lot, so, please check locally if your website works with PHP7, and fix it if necessary, we will do the switch in a couple of weeks.

Again, please check, IT WILL BREAK THINGS.

Edit 2019-08-26: It's been 3 weeks, last reminder, change in few days !

Edit 2019-08-29: First step done, it went not as bad as planned since both PHP5 and PHP7 are available, however PHP5 is now without curl due to a conflict with libcurl. PHP5 is still the default but will be switched to PHP7, meanwhile PHP7 can be enabled by adding AddType application/x-httpd-php7 .php to your .htaccess file.

Edit 2019-09-28: Curl support in PHP5 is back, we managed to fully port PHP5 to Debian Buster.