LiveConfig v2.10

LiveConfig v2.10 is available now.

The most important changes are:

• support for CentOS 8 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
• support for MySQL 8 and MariaDB 10.4 (new authentication systems)
• wildcard domains (e.g. *.tld) can be used for e-mail blacklists/whitelists
• using /var/www/.skel (if existing) as so-called “skeleton directory” when creating new webspace accounts
• checking expiry date of intermediate SSL/TLS certificated
• as well as many detail enhancements and bug fixes

The complete list of all changes is available as always in the changelog.

You can install the update as usual via the package management of your distribution:

• Debian/Ubuntu: apt update && apt upgrade
• CentOS/RHEL: yum update

New signature key from September 19th, 2020

From Sept. 19th 2020 a new signature key will be used for the LiveConfig packages and repositories. It is common practice to replace this key regularly for security reasons - we do this about every three years.

The new key has the fingerprint 712F 816D 2826 E355 7CB1 768F D409 AC6D 65FE 6664 und is valid from 03/23/2020 to 03/23/2023. The new key should already be installed in the following cases:

• if you have downloaded the LiveConfig key after 07/01/2020 /website relaunch) from www.liveconfig.com
• if you have installed a LiveConfig preview in the last few months
• if you install the current LiveConfig version (v2.10)

From v2.10, LiveConfig saves the GPG key in a system file:

• Debian/Ubuntu: /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/liveconfig.gpg
• CentOS/RHEL: /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-LiveConfig

This allows a more comfortable key management and simplifies automation.

PHP OpCache

As we found out together with some customers in the forum, there is a serious problem in PHP OpCache: if this is configured so that the OpCode can also be cached on hard drive (opcache.file_cache), this leads in some cases to PHP crashes (Segmentation Fault) when different PHP versions have written to the same cache. The problem arises mainly when switching to PHP 7.4.

The LiveConfig update to v2.10 checks whether the setting opcache.file_cache in the php.ini management is set to the previous default value (%HOME%/tmp). If so, this value is set to the empty string (""), which deactivates the file cache (the OpCache continues to work, but the data is only kept in the shared memory).

With PHP-FPM this may be suboptimal because the shared memory is used jointly for all pools. For the file cache to work properly, LiveConfig from v2.10 also supports the placeholder %PHP% in php.ini settings, which is replaced by the abbreviation of the PHP version used (e.g. php74).

Wenn der OpCache File Cache aktiviert werden soll, empfehlen wir, im LiveConfig die php.ini-Einstellung opcache.file_cache auf den Wert %HOME%/.cache/opcache.%PHP% zu setzen. Falls das angegebene Verzeichnis noch nicht existiert, legt LiveConfig es automatisch an (muss allerdings mit %HOME%/ beginnen). Alternativ kann der Cache auch im tmp-Verzeichnis (z.B. %HOME%/tmp/opcache.%PHP%) eingerichtet werden, sicherer ist aber ein separates Verzeichnis außerhalb von tmp.

If the OpCache file cache is to be activated, we recommend setting the php.ini setting opcache.file_cache in LiveConfig to the value %HOME%/.cache/opcache.%PHP%. If the specified directory does not yet exist, LiveConfig creates it automatically (however, it must begin with %HOME%/). Alternatively, the cache can also be set up in the tmp directory (e.g. %HOME%/tmp/opcache.%PHP%), but a separate directory outside of tmp is safer.

Backup feature (beta)

With v2.10 we have completely redeveloped the backup function so that it also works on multi-server setups, and enables the end customer to easily restore backups stored on the server.

Unfortunately, the first practical tests on larger installations revealed a few problems that we will solve in the next few weeks (including checking that there is enough free backup space and avoiding that the backups create too much load on the system).

If you want to get a first look at the backup feature, you have to set the LCDefaults key beta.backup.enabled to 1. For the time being, we do not recommend using this function in production.