WampServer

Hi everone!
Your presentation says that this WampServer is for development purposes, i.e. to be installed on your local machine. Can it be used on an actual server in a production environment to dish out web pages? I'm looking for an easy way out to install the 3 components on my Windows server.

Hi,

I am using WAMP for production in a business environment. You need to make sure that your application is secure, for example by using rewrite rules in the .htaccess file like Joomla to check the HTTP requests for SQL injection attempts and other nasty things hackers and scriptkids try every day to check if they can find vulnerabilities in unpatched applications. There are lots of security checks real world web applications and their components have to do to maintain the integrity of the server.

WAMP does not come with a mail server, but your PHP application can of course send email messages to an SMTP server for forwarding.

Make sure you install the MySQL utilities required to maintain the database tables, in case the server is shut down inadvertently or if one or more tables gets otherwise corrupted. Myisamchk is not installed as part of Wamp5, but if you download the MySQL server without installer from mysql.com and expanded it, you can then copy Myisamchk to the WAMP folder where the MySQL executable is.

You can then write a PHP command line script and schedule the integrity check of the database tables to run daily and send you an email if there is a problem that could not be fixed by the utility.

In the same way, you can schedule the databases to be backed up to a folder in the hard drive using mysqldump. The database backup folder can then be backed up to tape with the document folders and taken to an off-site storage.

It is important that your web server is located in the DMZ area of your network. Not all firewall routers have proper support for DMZ, which involves NAT, port forwarding and stateful packet inspection (SPI), possibly also some level of intrusion detection. Do a bit of reading on how to set up your network first. In the firewall setup deny first all requests and then allow only the essential services.

Regards,

toivo
Sydney, Australia



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/29/2007 02:18PM by toivo.

Thanks for the info, toivo.

I'm trying to install Joomla in sub-folder of a non-Joomla main site. The server administrator tried installing the Apache/PHP/MySQL trio manually but somehow can't get the MySQL to work. So I'm looking for a (lazy) easy way out and found this WampServer installer. For development, I use Xampp and recently moved to JSAS.

Thanks again. I'll take note of the security issues you cautioned. I'm anxious to get the site up and running -- and get paid asap ;-)

krismann