LastOS... what happened?

[The Freezer]

Anyone know what happened to LastOS?

[The Freezer]

When the LastOS server went offline back in November, it never redirected here. So it's possible a backup redirect was put in later (via the domain control panel) in case it should happen again. I'm hoping that's what happened in this case -- that the LastOS server is temporarily offline (again) and we're being redirected here to ssTEK in the meantime.

[The Freezer]

But now it looks like the redirect to here has stopped

[bphlpt]

Until you put it back so we can get things sorted. heheheh

[The Freezer]

Things are sorted...now. Unfortunately, we may never know exactly what went down or who was even responsible.

All we can do is to continue to push forward and sadly, to perhaps not rely on LastOS so much anymore.

[pacav69]

it looked like the dns servers had where redirected somehow

[The Freezer]

it looked like the dns servers had where redirected somehow

Yeah, that was the weird thing of it. Strangely, whoever deleted the entirety of LastOS courteously redirected it to here at ssTek.

[MUIDylan]

And now, 8 years after that, that site is gone!

[The Freezer]

It's actually still there and despite the notice, didn't get suspended. Others on the same host also got a suspended notice. The recent migration had created technical issues and other problems that we're still trying to resolve.

[The Freezer]

Regarding our recent outage over at LastOS.org...

Ghost had determined that PHP 7.3 and higher was causing the server error "lockout". I too believed the PHP version was the culprit; but confusingly the Bluehost cPanel was listing these versions, saying that we were running the PHP 5.6 engine:

cPanel 86.0 (build 32)
Apache 2.4.46
PHP 5.6.40
MySQL 5.6.41-84.1
Perl 5.30.0

Inspecting the file ~/public_html/.htaccess file, it at first declares PHP 5.6 as default then sets PHP 7.3 as actual engine:

Code: Select all

# Use PHP5.6 as default
AddHandler application/x-httpd-ea-php56 .php

RewriteEngine on
RewriteOptions inherit

<Files "config.php">
Order Allow,Deny
Deny from All
</Files>

<Files "common.php">
Order Allow,Deny
Deny from All
</Files>

<Files ".htaccess">
Order Allow,Deny
Deny from All
</Files>

# php -- BEGIN cPanel-generated handler, do not edit
# Set the “ea-php73” package as the default “PHP” programming language.
AddHandler application/x-httpd-ea-php73 .php
<IfModule mime_module>
</IfModule>
# php -- END cPanel-generated handler, do not edit


Which might be why it was showing the PHP 5.6 engine being used but it was really employing the 7.3 engine.

Setting our PHP to 5.6 (under "Programming, PHP Configuration" in the cPanel), seems to have fixed it. And just to confirm what Ghost found out, I tried setting PHP to 7.3 and immediately got the "lockout" server error.

I've got it set to PHP 7.2.34 presently without any problems (so far). Hopefully it'll buy us more time with our current XenForo v1.5

Curiously this is what I found on Wikipedia about PHP:

By November 2020, with PHP 8 being release later in the month, over 40% are still on outdated PHP 5; two out of every three websites using PHP are still on discontinued PHP versions, and almost half of all PHP websites use version 5.6 or older, that not even Debian supports (while Debian 9 still supports version 7.0 and 7.1, those versions are unsupported by The PHP Development Team). In addition, PHP version 7.2, the most popular supported PHP version, will stop getting security updates on November 30, 2020 and therefore unless PHP websites are upgraded to version 7.3 (or newer), 84% of PHP websites will thus use discontinued versions.

And much like Windows 9, it appears PHP 6 never actually existed. LOL