More Holiday Gifting - Software Upgrades

December 29, 2006 on 4:47 pm | In New Features by Dallas Kashuba |

Santa and Elf

While you’ve all been goofing off and having fun during this holiday season, we’ve been hard at work doing the setup for a few highly requested software upgrades!

Here’s the list of upgrades:

1. Imagemagick upgraded to version 6.2.4

2. Subversion upgraded to 1.3.2

3. Ruby upgraded to 1.8.5

The first two are already installed on around 75% of our servers and will be on all of the rest by the end of the day.

The Ruby upgrade may cause some complications so we’d like to take it a bit slower. If you are a Ruby user and you gotta have the latest version, let our support team know and we’ll install it on your server first.

You can’t say we never gave you anything now! And before you give us grief that one of these upgrades is not the version you wanted, take a moment to consider all the people out there that don’t even have what you have and appreciate what you do have. This is the holiday season, after all!

35 Comments

  1. 1

    Not that I use SVN on the Dreamhost Servers, thanks anyway, lots of people will appreciate it!

    Comment by Nigel — December 29, 2006 #

  2. 2

    Good to hear =)

    Comment by Oli — December 29, 2006 #

  3. 3

    > And before you give us grief that one of these upgrades is not
    > the version you wanted, take a moment to consider all the
    > people out there that don’t even have what you have and
    > appreciate what you do have.

    Yes - let’s remember that there are people who are forced to host their sites on Windows.

    Let us keep their plight in mind as we celebrate the holiday season.

    - Jeff @ DreamHost

    Comment by Jeff C. — December 29, 2006 #

  4. 4

    [quote[You can’t say we never gave you anything now![/quote]

    I’m still waiting for my giant red furry tennis racket & that rather large check ;-)

    Comment by Will — December 29, 2006 #

  5. 5

    Shhhh!

    - Jeff @ DreamHost

    Comment by Jeff C. — December 29, 2006 #

  6. 6

    my christmas cheer has just been extended another two weeks!

    Comment by Anonymous — December 29, 2006 #

  7. 7

    Note that Ruby 1.8.5 breaks Binding.of_caller which in turn breaks the breakpoint feature in Rails. If you need to use breakpoints on 1.8.5, you can use the call_stack gem, but that will slow down your app a lot so you should only do that in development.

    Ruby 1.8.5-p12 is the latest stable version just released this week, and has the security fix for the CGI exploit (which doesn’t affect Rails on DreamHost since that uses FCGI).

    Comment by josh — December 30, 2006 #

  8. 8

    [...] According to DreamHost Imagemagick is currently being upgraded to version 6.2.4 and Subversion is being upgraded to version 1.3.2. [...]

    Pingback by Unofficial DreamHost Blog » Blog Archive » Ruby upgraded to 1.8.5 — December 30, 2006 #

  9. 9

    With MySQL now becoming closed source, will DreamHost please offer POSTGRES.

    http://digg.com/linux_unix/MySQL_no_more_provides_binaries_to_the_users

    Pretty-pleaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase.

    Tim

    Comment by Timothy — December 30, 2006 #

  10. 10

    PHP 5.2 would be nice. JSONny goodness.

    With regards to those wanting to dump MySQL… Good riddance, it was an entirely unspectacular database anyways. Consider SQLite instead; it’s awesome.

    Comment by Albright — December 30, 2006 #

  11. 11

    Nice, now how about upgrading SpamAssassin? Puuuuuuuhleeeeez?

    -M

    Comment by Matt Hite — December 30, 2006 #

  12. 12

    My 2007 Wish List

    1. Python upgraded (current version is 2.5)
    2. PHP upgraded (current version is 5.2)
    3. Postgres (the BEST opensource database)
    4. Some type of modern webmail to replace squirrelmail
    5. Lighttpd (possibility the BEST web server)

    Comment by Rebecca — December 31, 2006 #

  13. 13

    I just noticed that Debian 4 will include:

    1. Python version 2.4 (no es current) :(
    2. PHP version 5.3 (very nice, i like)
    3. Postgres 7.5 (no es anywhere close to being current) :( :( :(
    4. n/a
    5. Lighttpd 1.4 (very nice, i like)

    Maybe when Debian 4 is released, DreamHost will upgrade and we will get Lighttpd as an option and upgraded packages.

    I would really looooooooooooooooove to have Postgres 8.2. DreamHost, I would do ANYTHING (IYKWIM) to have Postgres 8.2 available.

    Becca

    Comment by Rebecca — December 31, 2006 #

  14. 14

    I second an upgrade to SpamAssassin and and option of Lighttpd.

    Comment by Kevin — December 31, 2006 #

  15. 15

    I think I’m in La uHve with Becca.

    Comment by 337 — January 1, 2007 #

  16. 16

    HAPPY NEW YEAR DREAMHOST!

    Comment by Sara — January 1, 2007 #

  17. 17

    DSpam and greylisting too, please.

    There is way too much spam.

    Comment by 337 — January 1, 2007 #

  18. 18

    My 2007 Wish List:

    1. Django web framework full supported with one-click install and modpython
    2. PostgreSQL
    3. A new web panel

    Happy New Year!!!!

    Comment by Robert Bloom — January 1, 2007 #

  19. 19

    Thanks for the svn upgrade!

    I agree with ‘337′, add dspam and greylisting!

    Thanks,
    Craig

    Comment by Craig — January 1, 2007 #

  20. 20

    How about an upgrade to squirrelmail!

    Comment by Andreas — January 2, 2007 #

  21. 21

    My 2007 DreamHost Wish List:

    1. Web-mail upgraded to something more modern
    2. PHP upgraded
    3. PostgreSQL database

    And yes, I have voted on the panel.

    Comment by Henry — January 2, 2007 #

  22. 22

    Squirrelmail was updated to the most recent version available last week or the week before. Is there something else I’m missing about that?

    The more ‘modern’ replacement most people mention is the roundcube.net one but it’s nowhere near stable and usable for us yet. It’s only 0.1 beta right now.

    To all the people asking for lighttpd: What functionality does it provide that you want to take advantage of?

    To the PHP people: Pretty much every PHP upgrade causes us a crazy amount of headaches due to its often poor backwards compatibility. You need to try harder to convince us than just asking! What does it provide that you absolutely need?

    Comment by Dallas — January 2, 2007 #

  23. 23

    Yay! No more hacking ViewVC!!!
    Thank you so much!!!

    Comment by LaSombra — January 2, 2007 #

  24. 24

    I need at least PHP 5.1.4, Zend Framewrok requires it… :(

    Comment by gog — January 3, 2007 #

  25. 25

    @Dallas

    PHP 5.2 - provides well over 200 bug fixes that many of us experienced prior to this release.

    Lighttpd - it’s super crazy fast compared to Apache. Which is great when on a shared environment.

    Postgres - well, it’s completely free unlike MySQL (if someone uses InnoDB in a commercial setting they have to pay money). Also, Postrgres is arguably faster and fully ACID compliant unlike MySQL. Being ACID compliant is a big deal and most people don’t consider anything a “database” unless it’s fully ACID compliant.

    Modern web-mail - very true what you say that RoundCube is not in stable form. And I completely agree that something not marked stable should be used. Though, for what it’s worth - 0.1 is meant to be the first stable release and they are currently on beta2 of the first release. So sometime soon (maybe by summer) RoundCube will be available.

    Comment by Frank — January 3, 2007 #

  26. 26

    My 2007 wish list:

    1. A viable rails mongrel option.
    2. A datacenter in Japan (let me know if you want any help with that).
    . . .

    I guess that’s it, at least for now as far as major concerns are concerned.

    Comment by Jun-Dai — January 4, 2007 #

  27. 27

    @Dallas:

    Here is the short summary of improvements and fixes in PHP5.2:
    http://www.php.net/releases/5_2_0.php
    and this is the complete changelog:
    http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-5.php#5.2.0

    Few things that are great about 5.2:
    - new memory manager (aka faster servers)
    - added data stream support (finally developers are able to give some feedback to the user on uploads in form of a progress bar)
    - ability to use Zend Framework (now we must compile our own php for this)

    I really recommend reading this for more on why PHP5.2 is so important: http://ilia.ws/files/phpworks_php52.pdf

    Comment by Dodig — January 4, 2007 #

  28. 28

    O, and I forgot about new filter extension that is enabling developers to build much more secure sites + noticeably faster performance due to improved include_once() and require_once() functions, etc. etc.

    :)

    Comment by Dodig — January 4, 2007 #

  29. 29

    So, what’s the other side of the PHP story? What does PHP 5.2 break? I read through the pdf presentation but I’m not a PHP developer so I don’t know how commonly the changes might come up in day to day usage.

    For every person who wants us to upgrade, there’s probably another 10 who would be mad if we upgrade and break their website. We’re always in the middle getting blamed from both sides!

    @ postgresql people: We’ve put a considerable amount of work into our existing MySQL system. We’ve learned a lot of lessons the hard way and we’re still learning new things all the time. It’s not a small task to support a large-scale installation of a database server. We are always interested in investing time and energy into supporting the technology that will help you run your websites and we will continue to adopt new technologies as it makes sense. I can tell you that Postgres support has definitely come up in discussion more than once and it’s not totally out of the question for some point in the future (probably not near).

    Comment by Dallas — January 4, 2007 #

  30. 30

    php 5.2 breaks people using DateTime classes (yes, I once had one of those, but not anymore) , on the other hand, PHP 5.2 brings us DateTime :D and that’s a GoodThing ™ , and so’s the rest of PHP 5.2, so, Whip It Out Already (WIOA[tm]) :D :D :D .. please

    Comment by David Ramalho — January 5, 2007 #

  31. 31

    Great! :)

    I hope we will soon have the upgrade for RMagick too! :)

    Comment by mek — January 6, 2007 #

  32. 32

    Hey, you should really upgrade immediately Wordpress! 2.0.6. was released and there is (among numerous security fixes)

    [drumroll]

    * Compatibility with PHP/FastCGI setups.

    Please, upgrade our one-clicks, happy office :)

    Comment by John — January 6, 2007 #

  33. 33

    @Dallas:

    My thoughts on 5.2 breaking things:
    Every new version of every programming language breaks something for someone. But admin (in this case Dreamhost) is not to be blamed for it. It’s developers responsibility to stay on top of the things and fix his apllications to work with the latest version of chosen language.
    We have this policy where I work and it works flawlessly. Before upgrading we put out a notice that system will be updated so developers are alert and ready to fix any errors that might pop up.
    Of course it is completely different for mission critical applications, but those are on seperate servers.
    I know your customers are not all developers and many of them just use one-click installs so you are naturally “afraid” of their reaction if some of those break.
    I guess the right way to do it would be to test all your one-click installs on php 5.2 and if needed upgrade them and only then go on with upgrading to php 5.2.
    Idealy you need not worry for any other applications/websites as those that are installed by users should be updated and supported by them (us). Your only responsibility in that regard as a web host is to take care that every programming language is patched and up to date.

    I know, we are living in a real world with so many other factors interfering and not in an ideal world but just to share my thoughts…

    Best regards,

    Dodig

    Comment by Dodig — January 8, 2007 #

  34. 34

    I agree with majority that there’s a little neat feature that Dreamhost is still missing - a great DBMS PostgreSQL
    I would be really the happiest user if it would be available here!
    Pleeese, Guys, make us happy! :)

    Comment by 1inuxoid — January 9, 2007 #

  35. 35

    Dspam, dspam, dspam! :/

    The spam situation hurts baddddddlllllllly.

    Comment by Matt — January 15, 2007 #

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