I was expecting that. Fortunately, I was ready for it. So, I’ll describe some details of upgrading Leopard Server from 10.5.2 to 10.5.4 to avoid you the same trouble.
If you read my previous article about Leopard Server, you know that I had to recompile MySQL, PHP and Apache to PowerPC 32 bits, because I could not use the 64 bits version on our G5 server. The story was a bit complicated, but the idea was that I needed PostgreSQL and MySQL support on PHP. As the MySQL default installation on OS X Server doesn’t include the shared libraries, I had to recompile MySQL to be able to recompile PHP. But I could not make MySQL compile for 64 bits, so I compiled everything (including Apache) to 32 bits.
So, I was expecting it: as soon as I would upgrade my server, the installers would replace Apache with a more recent version, and it would not start because PHP and MySQL stuff was compiled for 32 bits. And it happened.
How to fix it? Simple. You have to do two things: first, remove the PowerPC 64 part from the httpd binary. Second, recompile your customized version of PHP, because PHP gets replaced too.
To remove the PowerPC 64 part of the binary, you don’t need to recompile Apache as I did before. There are two very useful commands you can use: file and lipo. If you do the following commands:
cd /usr/sbin
file httpd
The result will be:
httpd: Mach-O universal binary with 4 architectures
httpd (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O executable ppc
httpd (for architecture ppc64): Mach-O 64-bit executable ppc64
httpd (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
httpd (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
As you can see, Apple ships httpd compiled for their four possible architectures. In my case, I want to remove the ppc64 one to force httpd being executed in 32 bits. That’s where lipo comes in hand:
lipo -remove ppc64 -output httpd32 httpd
mv httpd httpd64
mv httpd32 httpd
That’s it. The ppc64 part of the binary has been removed, and a new binary was created. I then just switch the binaries, and there you go, Apache running on 32 bits mode on PowerPC:
httpd32: Mach-O universal binary with 3 architectures
httpd32 (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O executable ppc
httpd32 (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
httpd32 (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
Then I just needed to recompile PHP and everything was back on track.
Also, be careful because the 10.5.4 update will upgrade WebObjects to 5.4.2. If you are still using WO 5.3 like me, you’ll have to reinstall 5.3 again.