Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Server found, PHP installed

As luck would have it, I recently replaced an old server from an acquisition site that is currently running 2003 Server SBS edition, so I can use this server for the Drupal install. This will be preferred because I will not have to use anything that is in production, which will let me do server restarts anytime I need without disrupting anybody.

I wasn't sure if I was going to do a fresh install of windows or just clean up the existing install, but after a quick inspection I found that IIS was not ever installed. I figure it already as clean as it is going to get.

My first step was to install IIS and get it up and running. I downloaded an ISO for 2003 SBS, added IIS, and configured a new default web directory called "DRUPAL" . I created a default page index.htm and verified that I could access it over the network. Some permissions needed to be modified to allow anonymous access and directory browsing. Permissions are very lax for the installation process and will be tightened down before going online.

Next, I downloaded the Drupal installation files from Drupal.org. The current stable version is 5.2. Be warned that All of the files on that website come compressed in a "tar.gz" archive that windows cannot recognize by default. I've never heard of that extension before, must be an open source thing. I used Winrar to open the archive and extract into the drupal web directory.

Next up: Installing PHP!

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