ChatGPT the Network Admin

ByDaryl Moon

As a solo Linux System Administrator, I often come across problems that are difficult to solve. The old way was to Google a carefully worded question and hope that someone else had solved the problem before – and that I could find that solution. It wasn’t easy, and if your question was not well defined, then you end up reading through lots of well-meaning newbie responses that either don’t help or worse, send you off on the wrong track.

I’ve been a part-time Linux admin since the mid 1990’s, being one of the first 2,000 Linux users worldwide (according to a Linux user counter at the time), so I’m no newbie, but I’ve also not done any formal Linux admin training nor have I used it in a full-time job on a day-to-day basis.

Solving the PHP wrong version problem

I noticed that my website was running an old version of PHP (version 7.4), and it was recommended that I upgrade to the latest version. Now I’ve been down this road before, and it’s not as simple as just upgrading a single package. You can easily spend the best part of a day (or night) trying to unravel what went wrong when you simply tried to upgrade the PHP package.

Not having a maintenance agreement for my server or a managed service (it is an unmanaged Virtual Private Server), I’m pretty much on my own when it comes to making changes and keeping the server up to date.

I thought I’d see if ChatGPT could help, so I crafted the following prompt:

why does wordpress show me the wrong version of php? How do I correct this?

The response I got back was:

This usually happens because the PHP version that WordPress reports is different from the PHP version your web server or CLI is actually using.

Common causes are:

  • Multiple PHP versions installed
  • Apache/Nginx using a different PHP version than the command line
  • PHP-FPM pool mismatch
  • Hosting control panel overriding PHP
  • OPcache or object cache showing stale info
  • WordPress Site Health reading a different SAPIs/version
  • PHP upgrade completed but web server not restarted

It then proceeded to give me commands to execute to commence my diagnosis:

ChatGPT also recommended best practice and provided valuable advice:

Further on in the conversation, ChatGPT asked me to paste the output of a command:

apache2ctl -M | egrep "php|proxy|fcgi"
ls /run/php/
dpkg -l | grep php7.4

The output was:

rc libapache2-mod-php7.0 7.0.33-29+ubuntu20.04.1+deb.sury.org+1 amd64 server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language (Apache 2 module)
ii libapache2-mod-php8.1 8.1.34-3+ubuntu22.04.1+deb.sury.org+1 amd64 server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language (Apache 2 module)
ii libapache2-mod-php8.2 8.2.30-3+ubuntu22.04.1+deb.sury.org+1 amd64 server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language (Apache 2 module)
ii libapache2-mod-php8.3 8.3.6-0ubuntu0.24.04.8 amd64 server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language (Apache 2 module)

With this output, ChatGPT responded:

This output is the smoking gun.

You have multiple PHP Apache modules installed, including old ones, and Apache is almost certainly loading the wrong one or a stale handler.

Key line:

rc  libapache2-mod-php7.0

Even though it says rc (removed but config remains), the important part is:

👉 You still have multiple PHP Apache modules (8.1, 8.2, 8.3) installed at the same time
👉 Apache is currently resolving php_module to the wrong one (very likely 8.1 or 7.x remnants)

That is why WordPress still shows PHP 7.4.

ok so finally we are making progress!

After several more steps and checks, we got to a really good state, having resolved several underlying issues:

There was one small issue left, but it is not causing any issue, so it will be ignored for now (on advice from my expert buddy):

You want fries with that?

Having now solved the PHP version problem, ChatGPT (my new Linux guru buddy) offered to do some more updates and tuning.

I opted for the PHP-FPM tuning for WordPress and proceeded to make some adjustments to the PHP configuration, the MySQL database configuration, and the swap configuration.

I supplied the output from the “top” command, and ChatGPT analyzed that to come to the following conclusions:

The important part here is that ChatGPT was not guessing or providing some generic responses; it was analyzing the output I provided and giving exact recommendations that could have taken me hours of researching to find.

I then got a set of step-by-step instructions in priority order:

Having resolved the PHP and MySQL issues and commenced improving performance, we turned out attention to memory usage:

After a few more commands, we are in a pretty good position now:

Conclusion

I was pleasantly surprised at the level of expert guidance and best practices recommended. It gave me options to choose from, depending on my preferences, and explained things at every step. I learned a lot about PHP and MySQL configuration throughout the process and saved all of the output to my server log journal for later reference in case I have similar problems in the future.

This was far better than a knowledgeable buddy, as I could be as annoying as I wanted, constantly posting output from commands when ChatGPT was in the middle of recommending several steps to follow. It never got mad at me or got busy attending to something else like a human might. Even after my original problem was solved, there was that “you want fries with that” moment where I was asked what I wanted to do next and was offered several tasks that were obvious extensions of the problem we had just solved.

Overall, as a tech support experience, I would rate this experience as a 9.5 out of 10.

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