In case you noticed that Incoherent Babble dropped off the net for several hours today, it was due to an upgrade to PHP5 gone bad.

All it takes is one yum upgrade command to send your entire day into a downward spiral…

The fix? Go figure. I forced an “update” back to PHP 4.3 (from the cached RPMs found in /var/cache/yum, since the repo I use dumped them when they pushed PHP5 to stable). Everything totally broke then. No MySQL in PHP, nothing… Another quick yum upgrade, and everything is back up and running as if nothing ever happened. One or two corrections to the php.ini file (max memory size for a script, primarily), and it looks like we’re back in business.

Sometimes I just hate computers, I really and truly do…