We’re running a managed dedicated server hosted by Liquidweb. Those guys are usually a pretty good bunch, but sometimes it shows that they are also just mere mortals. Last weekend I asked them to upgrade MySQL from version 4 to 5 and I also casually asked whether our server OS could be upgraded from Cent OS 4 to 5. The weekend was coming up so it seemed like a good idea to get that underway.

Well, it turned out they actually had to upgrade the OS in order to get MySQL 5 to work. So the server was reinstalled, all hosting accounts re-imaged etc. Unfortunately, none of the PHP/server extensions – such as ImageMagick and GeoIP – survived the upgrade. No sweat, I thought, logged into our WHM site and tried to install the missing modules there. But the PECL installation always failed. So I contacted Liquidweb again – but for the first time ever I did not hear back from them for more than an hour (as I said, they’re usually pretty good, but I guess even they need a break every now and then).

It was kind of unnerving that some of our websites were not working because the extensions were missing. So I took it upon myself to install the stuff with the aid of Google and my moderate Linux knowledge. While imagemagick proved to be a piece of cake following directions given here, GeoIP was a somewhat tougher nut to crack. That was because the installation instructions provided here did not work for me as our yum repositories did not know anything about GeoIP. But at least I knew which packages were necessary:

GeoIP
GeoIP-devel
GeoIP-data

Since the server was running Cent OS 5 now, I needed the correct rpms. God was I glad that a site like http://rpm.pbone.net/ exists! Here I found everything I needed (careful – watch for the correct/corresponding package versions!):

http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/14025435/dir/centos_5/com/GeoIP-1.4.5-1.el5.centos.x86_64.rpm.html
http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/15707308/dir/centos_5/com/GeoIP-devel-1.4.5-1.el5.centos.x86_64.rpm.html
http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/15706982/dir/centos_5/com/GeoIP-data-20090201-1.el5.centos.i386.rpm.html

I logged into our server via SSH and navigated to the /root/tmp/ folder where I could safely execute the installation of the packages. I downloaded the three rpms from one of the mirrors:

wget ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/mirror/centos/5.6/extras/x86_64/RPMS/GeoIP-1.4.5-1.el5.centos.x86_64.rpm
wget ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/mirror/centos/5.6/extras/x86_64/RPMS/GeoIP-devel-1.4.5-1.el5.centos.x86_64.rpm
wget ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/mirror/centos/5.6/extras/i386/RPMS/GeoIP-data-20090201-1.el5.centos.i386.rpm

And installed them one by one:

rpm -ivh GeoIP-1.4.5-1.el5.centos.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh GeoIP-devel-1.4.5-1.el5.centos.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh GeoIP-data-20090201-1.el5.centos.i386.rpm

With sweaty palms I then typed the command

pecl install geoip

and jumped for joy when I did not get any error messages! I restarted apache via the WHM panel and – woohoo! – GeoIP extension worked as it should!