Recently I made the switch from Apache (an open-source HTTP server) to IIS (Internet Information Services) which is Microsoft’s own web server. I know it sounds like a strange move seeing as Apache is the industry leader in terms of webservers but I did this because I figure if I’m going to be studying for my MCSE then I should at least be playing around with IIS and learning it back to front. The other reason I changed is so I could have Exchange OWA working properly.
The changeover was relitively easy. The MySQL database required no changes so most of the work came down to configuration of the multiple domains and SSL setup. In Apache when you want to run multiple websites on the same machine you use a module called virtual host. To achieve this in IIS you use a setting called host headers, both of which are very simple to set up. Other settings that needed to be configured included the default content page (this being *.php opposed to index.htm or index.asp), document_root in PHP.ini and basic security permissions.
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Beau Tech apache, Exchange, host, HTTP, IIS, MCSE, MySQL, OWA, php, SSL
For 2 days now I have been trying to get “pretty” permalinks working in Wordpress and all it has resulted in is the dreaded 404 Page Not Found. The reason im writing about this is in hope that it helps others who are pulling their hair out when trying to get this to work. The whole idea of this was to change the default “ugly” links (http://example.com/?p=N) to something alot nicer and more search engine friendly (eg. http://example.com/category/post-name/). This was supposed to be a painless process but for some reason it just would not work!
Well.. after a couple of days scouring countless blogs, checking file permissions, modules, .conf files, I finally got it running. First of all I had to check that apache was loading the mod_rewrite module. To do this you need to edit /conf/httpd.conf in your apache dir and remove the # in front of LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so. Secondly you need to ensure that .htaccess (in your wordpress dir) has the correct permissions so that WP can write to it (chmod 666 – remember to change this back to 644 when done).
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Beau Tech apache, chmod, htaccess, permalinks, vhosts, windows
