php-fastcgi woe in blogland

At the end of last week I upgraded my server from Ubuntu Intrepid to Jaunty (and have since gone all the way up to Lucid, a process that was not as simple as I would have liked). As far as I could tell, everything had gone smoothly, but my blog was unavailable (which I discovered very quickly thanks to the automated Pingdom emails). My blog runs on php-fastcgi behind nginx, which had been very simple to install, but now, executing /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi start resulted in an “OK” status but no PHP server actually running!

Isolating the correct command from the startup script eventually got it running (although I still can’t work out whether it really is the quotemarks around $DAEMONARGS that’s causing this problem or not), but it stops again after a couple of hours. I can only guess that this is because I’ve been running it as a simple sudo and without & – but surely start-stop-daemon should handle all this for me?!

Anyway, an investigation into PHP-FPM as an alternative is underway, and this here blog will be massively intermittent until then!