Q We're currently migrating some websites from a 2.1ES server onto a new 3.0ES server. The main problem seems to be that 3.0 is using Apache 2.0 rather than 1.3. Our websites all are all PHP based and receive substantial amounts of traffic. On the PHP website, there's a page that suggests you shouldn't really be using Apache 2 and PHP in a production environment: http://uk.php.net/manual/en/faq.installation.php#faq.installation.apache2
So, my question is, what are my options? I presume I'm going to have to downgrade to version 1.3, but what are the consequences of doing this with regards to the up2date program?
A The questioner's comments here are rather dated and meant more for when Apache 2 was still brand new, less stable and had less (and less stable) module support. Also, the MPM model Red Hat uses is the default Prefork MPM, which is an order of magnitude more stable than the powerful but unstable worker MPM module. That being said, you can be further reassured knowing that there are thousands of Red Hat Enterprise 3 production web servers running httpd-2.0 with very active PHP sites, usually with dynamic content from backend MySQL too. It runs perfectly. As you're a Rackspace customer, if you have any specific code compatibility needs, please contact your support team about code compatibility issues between versions, or to ask about their code migration services, as well as bleeding edge options such as PHP5 and MySQL4.x. There are pre-built and tested packages that can be customised and installed for customers. If your situation does for some reason demand running Apache 1.3, this can be done because binaries are available in RPM format or can be compiled from source. You're quite correct in being concerned about up2date though - you'll need to add Apache to the package ignore list or it will be upgraded back to 2.0 as soon as up2date is run.