SEAS Computing transition from CentOS 7 to Rocky 9

February 2024

Over the next several months, SEAS Computing plans to update our servers that currently run CentOS Linux 7 with Rocky 9.  This change is due to CentOS Linux 7 reaching end of life on June 30, 2024. 

We know that several packages are being discontinued, and there could be features that might become unavailable or require major changes.

We will use this page to announce changes that we are aware of that may have a severe impact or change functionality.

There might be a need for users to make changes to their websites for them to continue working as intended.

Highlighted Package Changes

On MySQL changes: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/AuroraMySQL.Compare-80-v3.html

PHP is now running as a cgi process instead of a webserver module. This means any custom php configs have to be moved from .htaccess files to a .user.ini file. See https://www.php.net/manual/en/configuration.file.per-user.php and https://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php for more details if this applies to you.

PHP has had significant changes between versions 5 and 8. Among those is how you make a database connection https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-connect.php . There have also been lots of backward incompatible changes as PHP moved from 5 to 7 and then from 7 to 8.