I now appear to have a new Linux VPS running with CentOS and Plesk. I wont go into the stupid details of why this has taken 2 weeks to provision, or another 2 days for me to ‘fix’ the ip addresses etc, only to find that CentOS has an older version of PHP at 5.1 and MySQL needing to be upgraded to match with PHP 5.3 when I tried to upgrade.

I referenced Christian Montoya’s blog for the update for PHP but found that I had a couple of issues.

The first was that when I ran the yum command for the PHP upgrade it complained about the MySQL support / version.

yum update php

was changed to include MySQL

yum update php mysql

Which did what I needed.

Running the

php -v

Advised that the updated 5.3 version was installed but I then found that MySQL was not running.

A quick wade around discovered that /var/log/mysqld.log that there was another error preventing MySQL from starting. This was the message:

[ERROR] /usr/libexec/mysqld: unknown option '--skip-bdb'

Editing the /etc/my.cnf file to comment out this option in both the main section and the mysql_safe section of the file fixed this issue and allowed MySQL to start.

Next I had in the mysql log messages like:

[ERROR] Column count of mysql.proc is wrong. Expected 20, found 16. 
Created with MySQL 50077, now running 50156. 
Please use mysql_upgrade to fix this error.

So trying to use mysql_upgrade as a command by itself fails for user root@local host

]# mysql_upgrade
Looking for 'mysql' as: mysql
Looking for 'mysqlcheck' as: mysqlcheck
Running 'mysqlcheck with default connection arguments
mysqlcheck: Got error: 1045: Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO) when 
trying to connect
FATAL ERROR: Upgrade failed

Using the correct username is as simple as

#mysqlupgrade -u username -p  [Enter]

Which will prompt you for the password and then run the upgrade with the authenticated username.

And that, I hope, completes the backend upgrade so I can run SugarCRM on this server.