Well, as part of my WordPress install, I am using the Crawl Rate Tracker plugin. It shows the hits on your blog from various spiders and so on. In it’s dashboard (in your WordPress admin) there is a nifty chart that visualizes the info. Or, at least, there should be. In my case, I got a text link that just output the URL of the php script that should have generated the chart.

By looking into sbtracking-chart-data.php, I found that as it incremented a value to track the date, it hit the number 1225684800, which is apparently the max integer value in PHP 4.3.9, which is the version that was included in CentOS 4.x, with security patches backported. This value corresponds to some point during November 2, 2008. Well, as you well know, we are past that point in history, causing this PHP script to loop infinitely, since it never errored out upon incrementing that variable, it just stuck at the value 1225684800, and it was using the date as a means of breaking the loop.

To resolve this, I upgraded to PHP 5.1.6, which also required a MySQL upgrade. (The way I did it, anyway, which was the fast & easy, CentOS “semi-supported” way to do it.) I edited the file /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo to make the centosplus repository available by changing enabled=0 to enabled=1 and then adding this line under the same repository:

includepkgs=php* mysql*

which restricts the upgrades and installs from this repository to the php and mysql packages.

I ran yum update and let it download and install all the necessary packages. This put me at PHP 5.1.6 with some extra security patches and MySQL 5.0.68 with the same.

Upon an Apache restart (apachectl graceful) I tested the Crawl Rate Tracker plugin, and AHA! The chart is there, and as nifty as ever.
Goodnight.