Hi all, it’s been awhile since I posted here, because I’ve been busy setting up my new dedicated station hardware and software. My server is built, and I have decided to keep using PHP and MySQL, but this time is running in IIS on Windows Server 2012 R2. I had a heck of a time trying to get PHP working! Everything I tried failed, and I followed the instructions on every website I went to for help, and still had a problem. Well, as it turns out, I mistakenly named my php.ini file wrong - it was “pnp.ini” and of course this is not right, but I didn’t catch it until way later. I guess I must have overlooked the fact that I entered an “n” instead of an “h” in the name of the file when I renamed it.
IIS was also a bit of a challenge. Permissions are quite a bit different than Linux, but I think I can work with what Windows offers, as long as I don’t give out too much authority. A couple of my sites won’t run properly with Read-only access, it must be set to “modify”. When I was setting up IIS, I couldn’t get any of my PHP pages to show in the browser - it would only show me the PHP code, but this was eventually fixed by adding the MS Visual C++ Redistributable package and the .NET infrastructure files. The first several times I tried to install the C++ Redistributable package, it failed and I couldn’t figure out why. Eventually I found an MS site to download an older version, and that one worked, so now everything has been tied up nicely and is all working together in glorious harmony.
For Weather-Display, I exported my Registry settings and imported them into my new server, then installed WD and copied over all of the folders and data, and set up SFTP to transfer all of the files generated by WD, but then I realized I may not need an SFTP server, because it just dawned on me that I can just set WD to save everything locally, unlike my old Windows/Linux virtual box combination. But it might be nice to have an SFTP server in case I need to access something remotely like from my office.
I decided I’m not going to use this server just for WD - I’m going to make it a web server for all of the web projects I’m working on, such as Ampache for streaming some of my audio, and SAM Broadcaster to get my old radio station up and running again, copied over my genealogy site, and I set up a sandbox Joomla site to do some testing on, and transferred over all of my other websites and galleries to the new web server. I’m having a problem here though because a couple of my sites display Error 500 messages when I click on certain links to PHP files, and I have to figure out why. MS calls this a “general failure” without giving an explanation of what it is that went wrong. I have a feeling that I’ll have to start from scratch on those sites, because after I installed my Sandbox site, everything worked flawlessly on that, no matter what PHP links I clicked on.
The web server isn’t on the Internet yet, it’s only running locally on an internal IP address. I bought myself a 1 TB hard drive, so I have tons of space to all of the projects I want to do. Now I just have to find the time to do it.
Once I find a permanent place to put my server, I’ll be changing my router to open all the ports on the new server. Nobody will ever know that my sites will be running on Windows. Hopefully this will all go without a hitch.
If anyone else is trying to do something similar to what I’m doing, please contact me, because maybe I can offer you some help if you’re having problems.
Cheers,
Dan