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Test Server on Vista

Sitting around the house the other night I was almost regretting the move of my server from the home office to the new office.  A vpn connection to the server just isn’t the same as having a dedicated testing server on the LAN.

What to do, what to do?

Well, I no longer use Linux on my notebook for a lot of reasons, so Vista 32 Bit Ultimate resides there.

Apache, PHP 5, and MySql are all available for Win32, and are quite stable.  A lot of the so-called Windows experts say it’s difficult to install, or they had a lot of trouble getting PHP to work right, or blah blah.  Well it can’t be that difficult.  Most of these guys fear a text editor, and don’t understand manually editing a config file anyway.

For example, I manage a Star Wars gaming club’s web server, and the old admin was complaining about how hard it was to get PHP to work on the old windows server.

So, from start to finish, 10 minutes, not including the download.  Perfect working apache server with virtual host support, MySql, PHP 5, and for fun, MyPhpAdmin.

The only trouble was installing gvim and remembering to run it as admin to enable it to bypass User Account Control.  Very nice, easy installation.

For you windows guys, remember that UNIX uses the forward slash character for pathing conventions, not the windows backslash character.  Invest in downloading the gVim for windows variant of the tried and true open source Vim Improved Text editor.  You can get Vim from http://www.vim.org, of course.

Windows as a development platform isn’t too bad as long as you take the time to find equivalent tools and software.  Much of the open source software we take for granted on UNIX is available for windows.