Posts by cruiskeenconsulting

Caption this: WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Why does my new webcam keep saying "Exterminate!"?

Want to have your server pwned? Easy: Run PHP

No, this seems to show a great misunderstanding of how software versions work on production Linux distributions.

Production oriented distributions do not change version numbers for software servers while staying in the same OS release. Thus, if you're running Red Hat or CentOS or any number of other distributions, the latest supported release of PHP is ALWAYS the version that was released with the operating system, and security fixes are back-ported to that version. Thus a server that is running PHP 5.2 will (assuming the admin is actuallly installing patches) have all the newest security fixes - but will still be PHP 5.2. Upgrading PHP versions willy-nilly will make one's support customers crazy as their web sites break at every upgrade.

This "study" comes to its conclusion mostly by not understanding how OS distributions and web host providers actually operate in the real world.