Khom Nazid's questions

We're with Digital Ocean (DO), but I suppose this question applies to anyone hosting anywhere. In the Dnsperf rankings, DO is quite high, but in UltraDNS DNS speed tests, my domains hosted with DO come up much slower than others hosted with GoDaddy. The difference is to the tune of 90ms on DO compared to 2ms on GoDaddy.

Question: do these tests tell me anything about DNS speed, or are they always relative to wherever the test server (from UltraDNS in this case) may be? We're trying to speed up our DNS and have tried the likes of DNSMasq on our 'droplet' VPS server, but the DNS speed tests results remain the same.

Are we over-engineering? Would love to hear any guidance on how to make our DNS work at the best possible speed. Thanks.

I am on CentOS 7. When I do a yum update, it shows me this issue:

** Found 1 pre-existing rpmdb problem(s), 'yum check' output follows:
php-7.3.4-1.el7.remi.x86_64 has missing requires of httpd-mmn = ('0', '20120211x8664', None)

There's no httpd or Apache on my server. The repos I have include:

# yum repolist 
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, replace
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
 * base: mirror.cc.columbia.edu
 * epel: epel.mirror.constant.com
 * extras: mirror.cc.columbia.edu
 * remi-php72: mirror.team-cymru.com
 * remi-php73: mirror.team-cymru.com
 * remi-safe: mirror.team-cymru.com
 * updates: mirror.cc.columbia.edu
repo id                                      repo name                                                                        status
base/7/x86_64                                CentOS-7 - Base                                                                  10,019
epel/x86_64                                  Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 7 - x86_64                                   13,125
extras/7/x86_64                              CentOS-7 - Extras                                                                   387
mariadb                                      MariaDB                                                                              67
nginx/x86_64                                 nginx repo                                                                          150
remi-php72                                   Remi's PHP 7.2 RPM repository for Enterprise Linux 7 - x86_64                       367
remi-php73                                   Remi's PHP 7.3 RPM repository for Enterprise Linux 7 - x86_64                       307
remi-safe                                    Safe Remi's RPM repository for Enterprise Linux 7 - x86_64                        3,188
robert-gcj/x86_64                            Copr repo for gcj owned by robert                                                    16
robert-pdftk/x86_64                          Copr repo for pdftk owned by robert                                                   3
updates/7/x86_64                             CentOS-7 - Updates                                                                1,840
repolist: 29,475

What do I need to do to remove that error during yum update?

While executing the following command from my Mac OSX:

 nmap -PN  server.com

It reports the following:

Starting Nmap 7.70 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2019-04-18 16:14 EDT
Nmap scan report for server.com (9.9.9.9)
Host is up (0.020s latency).
Not shown: 997 filtered ports

PORT     STATE SERVICE
80/tcp   open  http
443/tcp  open  https
8080/tcp open  http-proxy

The http and https are fine, but I'm befuddled by the http-proxy. We have nothing running on port 8080 on this server:

# sudo ss -lnp | grep :8080
#     

And netstat output:

# netstat -tnlp

Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name    
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:3306            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      12378/mysqld        
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:80              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      2441/nginx: master  
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:443             0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      2441/nginx: master  
tcp6       0      0 :::80                   :::*                    LISTEN      2441/nginx: master  
tcp6       0      0 :::443                  :::*                    LISTEN      2441/nginx: master  

This is an Nginx server with no proxying back to anything else, it's just Nginx. What can we do to "close" this non-open port. Is this a bug with Nmap or am I misunderstanding something?

I am trying to upgrade the PHP version on a Digital Ocean server from 5.6.19 to the latest PHP 7.2. A lot of instructions found online point to "php72", which makes me wonder if 5.6.19 will be seamlessly replaced with a yum update php. I doubt it.

Which means I may have to first 5.6.19, in which case I run the risk of totally deleting old settings. This is scary in case th enew setup does not go well, there's not much to flip back to.

I find there are important settings in these places:

1. /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf
2. /etc/php.ini
3. /etc/php-fpm.conf
4. /etc/nginx/common.conf
5. /etc/nginx/fastcgi.conf

And of course the Nginx.conf (the main Ngnix config file) has calls to PHP-FPM accordingly. They include the #4 file above, common.conf, which in turn includes the fastcgi.conf.

Instructions on external websites, such as this one-- https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-install-php-7-2-on-centos-7-rhel-7/ --do not take into account Nginx and PHP-FPM specifics especially in terms of old PHP 5.6.19 already existing.

All these instructions anyway speak of "php72", which I am afraid will change all the paths, and I'll have to update all paths to new php links everywhere.

Could you please advise how best to do this so I seamless upgrade the old PHP with the latest, with all the usual paths as above working? Otherwise we need to:

1. Remove 5.6.19
2. Install 7.2, and all additional modules (which will introduce the "php72" in the paths)
3. Make sure all paths everywhere are new everywhere..

Any way to make this simpler in a OS-default way, without additional repos like "Remi" etc?