So when you own a dedicated server you have to keep up with all updates, etc.  This is one thing I dread as I don’t consider myself super technical in this area.  I can poke my way around a linux box and do small tasks - but anything large (configuring exim) and I’m screwed and usually hire help.

For a couple weeks now I’ve been getting notification that my version of “perl” was too old and needed upgraded.

The version of perl you are running (v5.8.7) is too old.  There are known problems that cannot be worked around with this version of perl.  It is HIGHLY recommended that you upgrade to v5.8.8 or later.  Any module install failures should be ignored until perl has been upgraded as some modules will not be able to install with this version of perl.

Of course, I dreaded this and never really looked at the “how-to”.  Come to find out, the instructions included in the email were AWESOME!  I followed them 100% and things went very smooth.  The entire Perl upgrade took just 20 minutes.  Below are the instructions I used to upgrade my version of Perl.  Now lets just hope nothing breaks due to the upgrade.

You can ensure that each installed module gets carried over to
the updated Perl build with the use of the “autobundle” CPAN feature.

You can create a bundle of the currently installed modules
by executing the following while logged in via SSH as root:

perl -MCPAN -e ‘autobundle’

Once completed, you should see the following output before getting
returned to the shell:

‘Wrote bundle file /home/.cpan/Bundle/Snapshot_2007_08_16_00.pm’

Once you’ve made note of this file name, you can proceed with the update.

On linux based systems, you should be able to update Perl using
the installer provided at layer1.cpanel.net:

cd /root
wget http://layer1.cpanel.net/perl588installer.tar.gz
tar -zxf perl588installer.tar.gz
cd perl588installer
./install

On FreeBSD based systems, you will need to install Perl from ports.

This will take a few minutes, so take a coffee break and check
the status when you return. Once the update has completed, you
can install all previously installed modules from the CPAN bundle
by executing the following (with the bundle name adjusted to the
name of the bundle generated earlier):

perl -MCPAN -e ‘install Bundle::Snapshot_2007_08_16_00′

This should install each of the modules present in the bundle,
assuming there are no issues during the installation (dependencies,
network, etc).

Once this has completed, execute the following to ensure that all modules
required by cPanel are installed, and restart cPanel:

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/checkperlmodules
/usr/local/cpanel/startup