Hullo, O Clients…

Within your CPanel is a nifty thing called Fantastico. Great name and all, but it should really be called something descriptive, like The Thingy That Installs Nifty Web Software For You (As Long As You Have An Available MySQL Database) And By The Way, It Also Monitors Whether The Installed Software Is Up To Date.

On second thought, Fantastico is not such a bad name.

Did you get an email saying you needed to upgrade? Fantastico! Here’s what you do!

If you are running a standard (no adaptations, mods, frills, and bells and whistles) version of the program in question, and know it, you can do the upgrade yourself by pushing the appropriate button. Go into Cpanel, Find the Fantastico button and click it. You’ll see a listing of fantastico-installed software, and a notification that one or more is out of date.

STOP! Is there a lot of custom work on your application? Jeepers, don’t push that button! Call your techdonkey.

If you’re sure  (sure, now) that you’re running a standard version, go ahead and… get back out of the Fantastico upgrade screen and into your backups screen. Make a backup and download it to your home ‘puter. Do it now.

Okay,  now go back and tell Fantastico to upgrade. You need a bit of room to do so.

Out of room? As a quick fix, throw out the contents of your tmp folder your the root directory IF you don’t care about reading your fascinating webstats.

Go back and check your application, whether Wordpress or phpBB or what have you.

Does it work? Hooray! In your root folder, you’ll find a folder named something like “fantastico backups”. It’s now safe to delete the *.tgz file within. Or download it to your home ‘puter and then delete it from the server, in case you’re paranoid about backups.

Have you done a backup lately? Have you?