Nigel “Cougar” Wilks has released two new Windows Home Server Add-Ins today that should be of interest to those of you that are looking to expand the capabilities of Home Server. Both Add-Ins should work with any Windows Home Server, and not just the MediaSmart Server. The first Add-In is called WHS PHP Installer. It has been in public beta for several weeks with good results and is now available for official 1.0 release. Here’s a description of the Add-In from the Readme file.
WHS PHP Installer will install a preconfigured PHP 5.2.6 install for Windows Home Server based systems. This Add-In includes PHP software, freely available from www.php.net/software but has been compiled into a Windows Home Server Add-In to make an it easy and convenient to install. Customization can be done to the PHP.INI file as required, however we have picked some popular extensions to make the installation as easy as possible.
WHS PHP Installer is easily installed simply by placing the .msi file into your server’s Software\Add-Ins folder, and then clicking Install in the Server Console. After the install completes you can access an included test page to verify the installation was successful. The test page can be found at http://yourservername/test.php and will show the PHPInfo() output.
For those not familiar with PHP, it is a scripting language primarily used for the rapid and easy development of web sites. Examples of software written in PHP are PHPBB, (the forum software here at MediaSmartServer.net), WordPress, Gallery, and many more. WHS PHP Installer is meant to automate the several manual steps required to get PHP installed and configured on your Home Server to act as a foundation for you to install additional applications such as those mentioned above.
PHP by itself is powerful, but to use all the software examples previously mentioned you’ll need a database. This brings us to the next Add-In that Nigel has released today, WHS MySQL Installer. MySQL is an extremely popular database software that is a prerequisite for many PHP applications and thus a natural fit as an infrastructure component to complement WHS PHP Installer. Nigel has released beta version 0.0.5 and is seeking input from those that install it. Note that he also includes PHPMyAdmin which is a popular web configuration utility for MySQL, so if you’ve got PHP installed you’ll have instant access to your database configuration via http://servername/pma.
If you like these Add-Ins, post in the comments or in the forum posts linked above and let Nigel know how it’s working for you, as well as what applications you’d like to see packaged into easily installable Windows Home Server Add-Ins. I’m personally voting for Gallery.
Article by Alex Kuretz
I'm Alex Kuretz, and I'm the founder of MediaSmartServer.net. I was the Lead Test and Integration Engineer at HP for the MediaSmart Server until April 2008 when I moved on to other opportunities outside HP. I've kept active in the Windows Home Server community, creating several add-ins and helping users make the most of their Home Servers.
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Nice job Cougar,
My vote is with Alex, Gallery 2.
Ha ha, you both know that was my end goal for this one anyway!
Let me get the Beta finished and I’ll have it done.
hallo!
nice job! PHP & MySQL normally uses apache. Windows Home Server uses Microsoft Internet Information Server.
Is this installation so configured, that the php-scripting and the database MySQL is linked to the IIS?
thank you!
Yes its all set to go via IIS.
Alex,
Thanks for making this installer easy to use with WHS.
I just up’d my MSS to HP V.3.3 and decided to give this a go instead of using the Microsoft Web Platforms solution I used last time. I’m trying to get a Glype proxy (CGI) to run, but it’s not working exactly correctly. I can get to the index.php page, but when I fill out the form and submit it, the server is not able to process the new data from another associated .php file. I tried switching the php association to the php-cgi.exe and enabling executables but that didn’t work either.
I got this to work with the Fast-CGI extension (fcgiext.dll) previously, but that was with a different approach.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
JesterEE
So almost 3 months later I decided to get to the bottom of my issue posted above and found my answer … thought I’d share for all to hear.
The issue was that in the php.ini configuration file, I needed to tell php that cURL was there to use (cURL is the backbone of Glype). So simply find the place in the php.ini file the extensions are loaded and add this line:
extension=php_curl.dll
After that, reload IIS so the change takes effect. To do this
1) Open the IIS Manager->Application Pools
2) Right click the DefaultAppPool
3) Select Recycle
Check that curl was loaded in the phpinfo.php page (or test.php if you use this installer).
1) Open an Internet Explorer window on the server
2) Navigate to http://localhost/test.php
3) Search for “curl”
4) You should see cURL support enabled about 6-10 pages down.
Next try out your proxy and see if you have success!
Good Luck
-JesterEE
Another quick note from the last 2 posts (sorry for the spam
).
I had an issue getting images to load properly through the proxy. To fix this use ‘php-cgi.exe’ instead of ‘php5isapi.dll’ as the executable for the Glype proxy. To make this change:
1) Open the IIS Manager
2) Navigate to the Virtual Directory of your Glype proxy
3) Right click->Properties
4) Virtual Directory Tab->Click Configuration
5) Mappings Tab->Navigate to .php extension
6) Edit
7) Change Executable Path from %PHP_INSTALL_DIR%\php5isapi.dll to %PHP_INSTALL_DIR%\php-cgi.exe
-JesterEE
Thanks for sharing your tips, JesterEE!
Hi, I have SQL server 2008 in WHS and turned off the TCP/IP. I am new to MySQL, does MySql provide a similar setting?
Sam, I believe by default MySQL is restricted to localhost access only for TCP/IP connections. However, a quick Google search turned up the following option for MySql.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-config-wizard-networking.html
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