Why I HATE “smart” Software: Cpanel vs Consultant
30 Oct2007

Today I was working on one small consulting task and our client asked for an upgrade from MySQL 5.0 to 5.1. It was pretty easy and task was successfully finished and reported to the customer… But few hours after my report I’ve got an email from customer with something like “WTF? Where is my 5.1?!”. I was shocked when I saw happily running 5.0 on their server w/o anything related to my 5.1 installation…

After some short investigation I’ve found out, that it was cpanel (dumb software for dumb system administrators) – it noticed, that installed mysql version (5.1) is not the same as it thought it should be (5.0), so without any warnings or notices it removed all 5.1 rpms and installed “brand new” 5.0.

Here I’d like to say GREAT THANKS to mysql team for such a great software which did not screwed up user’s data in such situation. But what idiots in cpanel development team decided, that is it appropriate and acceptable to perform such operations?! As an administrator and as a software developer I do not understand them – I just can’t understand such approach….

So, enough complaining – here is a piece of useful information for my readers: If you’re so unlucky to have cpanel installed on your server and you’d like to upgrade your mysql manually, then you can perform following operations:

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# touch /etc/mysqlupdisable
# chattr +i /etc/mysqlupdisable
# service cpanel restart

After these small changes your cpanel will forget about mysql upgrades and you’ll be able to do what you want and not what some dumb developers decided you should do.