My dedicated server, used for Exhibit and other projects, is located in Texas, hosted by EV1. It’s a nice machine, lots of storage, lots of bandwidth. The only problem is that it runs a) Red Hat Enterprise Linux, b) Ensim, c) PHP 4.x and d) MySQL 4.x. Exhibit uses PHP code from PHP5, and needs MySQL 5 too.

Upgrading to PHP5 has not been a problem — however, the server is no longer supported, because EV1 will only support their outdated packages. Upgrading to MySQL5 has not been so easy — at first, we did a separate installation, so that MySQL5 and 4.x both existed on the server, but MySQL5 was fired up separately.

After fidgeting and fiddling with it for several months, I’ve decided that I want to wipe the entire server, and put some sort of .deb-based distro on it, preferably Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (’Dapper Drake’).

Although I haven’t looked into it, I suspect EV1 will balk at this project. Not only will they obviously not support Ubuntu, but I don’t think they’ll even install it for me. (Still checking on this, as of the time of writing). So I’ve been looking into remotely installing Debian or Ubuntu. I’ve found one tutorial for Debian, here, and a tutorial that builds off the Debian one, for Ubuntu.

I haven’t tried the tutorials yet… Going to brood about it for a few days or weeks, and if nothing promising develops with the EV1 people, I’ll have to go ahead and give it a shot.