OCF downtime Thursday 3/27 from 10 AM to 5 PM

Eshleman Hall is scheduled to be dark this Thursday (3/27) from 10 AM to 5 PM for construction work. Since our connection to the campus network and the rest of the world runs through Eshleman, we'll be offline during this period. Incoming mail should be queued by senders and delivered normally after the outage, so it won't be lost.

Reminder: PHP 5 now the default

As previously announced, the default PHP interpreter is now PHP 5 as of today. See the previous post or our documentation for more information on what this means and how to ensure your web applications continue to work.

OCF general meeting Thursday 3/20

There will be a general meeting Thursday, March 20, at 7 PM in 109 Wheeler, to discuss amendments to the OCF bylaws and constitution. See http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sluo/draft-bylaws.txt for details of the proposed changes. Everyone is welcome to attend, and food will be provided.

Print Queue Online and In Real Life

We've talked about it, and now it's here! The print queue is now available on display in lab on a dedicated machine and monitor by the printer, as well as online at your convenience. It was formerly accessible only via command line (lpq -s) and printing status windows in Windows, neither of which were visible enough for the majority of our users to notice. Thank you Aaron Oaks, Genevieve Wong, and Mike Gasidlo for working on making this happen.

PHP 4 to PHP 5 transition

Due to the PHP developers' decision to end support for PHP 4, the OCF will be requiring all users with PHP web applications, such as WordPress, phpBB, or Gallery, to use PHP 5. This transition, required by the campus Minimum Security Standards, will provide more features, security, and performance for PHP web applications on the OCF. As the current default PHP interpreter is PHP 4, almost all users of PHP will be affected, though few will need to make drastic changes to their applications. The transition will happen in two stages:

• As of March 21st, 2008, the default PHP interpreter (the one used to run scripts with extension .php) will change from PHP 4.4 to PHP 5.2. Users who cannot migrate to PHP 5 by this date may choose to continue to use PHP 4 temporarily; see our transition documentation for details.
  
• As of May 12, 2008, support for PHP 4 will be removed entirely. All PHP applications in use after this date will be run using PHP 5.
  

Users whose websites do not include web applications, or whose web applications are written in another language such as Perl, will not be affected.

All PHP users should review their web applications for compatibility with PHP 5 as soon as possible. Most widely-used web applications already support PHP 5, so in many cases, no action is needed; in most others, an application upgrade will be sufficient to ensure continued functionality. Users who use custom-written PHP applications need to review their code for PHP 5 compatibility; see the links provided in our documentation for details on what's changed.

We recommend that you test your web application with PHP 5 before the transition date; instructions on how to do this are in our documentation.

The latest information on the change, and details on how you can ensure your web applications continue to function, can be found at:

http://docs.ocf.berkeley.edu/wiki/Major_service_changes

If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to contact us (email staff@ocf.berkeley.edu).