The default php53 packages set on CentOS repo does not contain mcrypt support. To get this library working for your web server you can take one of two ways. Either build php53 mcrypt.so extension yourself, there is a short guide for that. Or go the lazy way:

1) Add EPEL repo to your repositories list.
2) Install the mcrypt module:

3) Edit your php.ini, and add extension support

4) Restart web server.

Mcrypt support is needed if you want to implement micro payments on your WordPress blog. Tinypass micro payments system is born to power micro stocks and self-hosted publishers.

After midphase.com dumped my old hosting plan without notice, I started to think, is it really that complicated to run a small hosting yourself? After all, Linux OS is very well documented and you just need to read and listen, and do good. Oh, I learnt very well how not to do unnecessary, the cost of “interesting” could be huge on a personal scale in terms of wasted time. Thus, limited myself to very basics with no X-related fun, I have started to run this at rackspace. Just because ping is better to rackspace in London than to gandi in Paris.

What was bad, I am in the middle of a project for my current employer, so I only got few evenings to everything set up. What was good,  I have got around 30 of such evenings to have fun with a new server setup.

Rackspace lacks CentOS 5.6 docs in its knowledge base and is really making business on tech support, keeping its predefined system images just bare bones. It took time for me to realise that their repos does not install PHP 5.3 by default, so if you mistakenly did

# yum install php

than you have to yum remove it, instead doing

# yum install php53

Since by default CentOS 5.6 still includes PHP 5.1 in default software distribution.
Fortunately, MySQL was not an administration problem.

Here I am. Happy birthday!