I installed a new IPFire 2.77 last week. It worked fine for several days. But today it won’t run the webserver and when I do apache restart, it gives me sytax errors in loadmodule.conf. The first was that mod_cgi.so was missing. I just commented that out and now it tells me I’m missing libphp5. Is there a command to update/install php?
I already ran pakfire update and pakfire upgrade. There was nothing new there.
There is no 2.77 major version. The latest major version is 2.27 and the current core update is 180.
I am presuming that you meant 2.27 and that the core update you used was 180.
PHP was removed from IPFire in Core Update 118, 5 years ago.
Something must have gone badly wrong on your system if the webserver is trying to access php related files that haven’t existed for 5 years.
Rather than trying to find out what got corrupted and try and figure out how to fix it, the simplest option would be to do a fresh install.
Yes, 2.27.
Thanks for clarifying the deprecation of php. I think what happened was that I restored the firewall rules from version 2.19. the inappropriate loadmodule.conf must have been part of the backup. I’m going to grab loadmodule.conf from my other IPFire 2.27. If that doesn’t work, I’ll go for a clean install.
I took the entire conf directory from my other server. It didn’t seem to have any server ID or IP address information. I SFTPd it into place and started Apache. Success!
Depending on which Core Update you had then that backup would be between 5 and 7 years old (Core Update 100 to Core Update 120).
From Core Update 120 to Core Update 180 there have been some significant changes in how the WUI works with things like IPS moved from single provider to multi provider and the two are not compatible, etc…
Likely the php change falls into the same category.
The best approach is to do a regular backup and periodically transfer them from IPfire to another separate system.
I have a script that runs the IPFire backup with logs once a week and every month I back those up to my central backup system using bacula.
Also every time I am about to do a Core Update I manually run an IPFire backup with logs and download that file from IPFire to another PC.
That way I always have available an up to date backup to restore from should the core update have a fault and I need to do a fresh install.