This morning, iOcean was upgraded from Mac OS 10.3.9 to 10.4.2. OS 10.4.2 brings with it improved support for setting up SSL certificates, which will allow us to enable the https protocol and start developing web apps with secure logins. Of course, there are several other new and improved features in 10.4, which you can read about on Apple’s OS X Server site.

The installation was relatively painless: we imaged the existing 10.3.9 system drive for safety’s sake, ran an Upgrade Install, and troubleshot a few issues that cropped up. Of our major services, file sharing and logon services transitioned without any issues. Apache and the firewall required some small reconfiguration. The subversion URL responsibilities have been moved from an instance of apache in /usr/local to an instance in /opt. The instance in /opt is part of the 10.4 install and will hopefully be supported in Apple software and security updates (as opposed to the /usr/local instance, which we had to maintain manually). MySQL and PHP both worked after the upgrade, but PHP could not connect to MySQL because the MySQL socket had moved from /tmp to /var/mysql. Changing this path in the php.ini file solved the problem.

The remaining work to be done on iOcean consists mainly of cleanup. The unused instance of apache in /usr/local should be removed. Also, during the upgrade process it came to light that there are two instances of PHP on iOcean. One is a standard install, which will be support by updates from Apple. The other is a custom install that was compiled with the domxml libraries (needed for some of our scripts) but which needs to be maintained manually. We are hoping to consolidate the two soon. We are also still considering whether or not to reinstall Fink, as it is questionable how much use it saw on iOcean under 10.3.