I posted last July that PHP 4 is nearing the end of its life, and that therefore we must begin migrating our sites to PHP 5. PHP 5 is largely compatible with PHP 4, but I expect that most sites based on older code will need at least some modification to work properly under PHP 5.
The final version of PHP 4, version 4.4.8, was released in January and was recently installed on our main web server. The PHP development team has committed to providing security patches for 4.4.8 until this August; after August, using PHP 4 will be a violation of the campus minimum security standards. That situation gives us a fairly hard deadline for migration, and we’d like to be migrated well before then.
We have set up a development web server running Apache 2.2.8 and PHP 5.2.5 to allow departments to test their sites with PHP 5. Contact sysadmin@LS if you are interested in getting set up on the development server.
Our target date for cutting over to PHP 5 will be May 1, 2008. At that time, we’ll put PHP 5 in production on our main server, and any of your PHP code which is incompatible with PHP 5 will break. I expect that most sites will continue to work fine, with perhaps some small glitches, but it’s impossible to know unless you test your code beforehand.
We’ll be sending more communications about this change-over as it approaches.
Many applications on campus which require CalNet authentication use the Authentication Web Server (AWS) service; examples include AirBears, blu, and a number of applications deployed by departments, including the content management systems developed by LSCR’s web team.
Due to the aging of the technology, AWS is going to be replaced by Central Authentication Service (CAS); the tentative date for the deprecation of AWS is December 31, 2008. Moving from AWS to CAS will require some changes to all the applications currently using AWS; the changes should be fairly simple to implement.
The biggest advantage of CAS is that it provides single sign-on to all applications using CAS; that is, once you’ve logged on through CAS once, if you visit another web site which uses CAS, you won’t have to retype your password. This will be a boon for most users, especially those coming in through AirBears who’ll have to use CAS to get on the network in the first place.
If you have an application that’s currently using AWS, you should look at the links above to start working on migrating to CAS. Both services will run in parallel for at least the rest of this year; you can move to CAS at any time. It probably makes sense to move sooner rather than later, since CAS provides better functionality.
Bernie Rossi from the CalMail team posted a message today about legacy mailing addresses on CalMail. Many people are still using user@uclink (or @uclink2, @uclink3, @uclink4) as their From: address in their email clients; some others got set up as user@calmail.berkeley.edu when CalMail first went into production.
All of these alternate addresses have been basically equivalent until now; you could use any of them in your From: address, and anyone sending you mail could use any of them to address you. They all wind up in your CalMail inbox. Going forward, most of this will still be true; mail sent to user@uclink will still be delivered to user@Berkeley.EDU. The change is that, due to anti-spam provisions in the mailing list system, you will need to subscribe to the mailing list with the same address you use in your From: address in your email client. There are mailing lists which have been in existence for many years which are filled with @uclink and other legacy addresses; CalMail’s current plan is to replace those email addresses on mailing lists in bulk. (Scheduled for February 28).
What that means is that if you currently have your From: address set to be user@uclink, on February 29 (happy leap year!) mail you send to (most) mailing lists on lists.berkeley.edu will not be delivered–it will be held for approval by the list owner.
The easiest thing to do is just to set your mail client to use user@Berkeley.EDU as your From: address. It looks nicer that way, anyway. Bernie provided rudimentary instructions if you want to do it yourself, or you can contact your LSCR support team for help. Note that if you do this before February 28, you may have the same problem sending to mailing lists until the change is made, so it’s best to wait until the end of the month.
