Well, after the mini rant over XAMPP I had a think. At the moment the set up here is: two machines running Windows XP, one Windows Server 2003, two with SuSE and Ubuntu – with a solaris machine any day now. Now, while XAMPP has been great in the past there is no real reason why I cant bite the bullet and remove all the webservers from all machines (there are lots of obscure ones running in the background – dont ask me why….) then actually install the servers I want, with the mods I want for the network as it is right now! Sadly, and I think this is true with most SOHO environments, the network here is something that has evolved over time with bits and peices bolted on as requirements changed. In the ideal world, the whole network topology would be engineered for the specific purpose and everything would work perfectly well.

This is not an ideal world.

So, it looks like over the next few weeks I am going to investigate getting a sensible development network set up which can also act as a firewall for the internet connection and serve intranet pages. Sounds like fun doesnt it.

Ideally, one of the SuSE machines and the Windows 2003 machine will act as network servers – here we use both to make sure as much development as possible is cross platform – and I think the general set up will be for the linux machine to run:

Apache on port 80 with PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby and Mono set up.
MySQL
PostgreSQL

The windows machine (which doesnt get used for anything else except serving…. lazy machine) will run:

IIS on port 80 (Perl, .NET)
Apache on port 8088 (php, perl, python, ruby)
SQL Server 2000 (old but I am not paying for the upgrade)
Cold Fusion Server
MySQL Server

I am sure over the next few weeks I will think of extras!

The best thing about my current plan, is I am away from the network for the next month, which means I will actually have time to plan and map out the network topography. How cool is that!