Any help appreciated (re: php and mysql)

[Buck]

Since I started my new job, one of the side duties I have on the back burner is tinkering around with a community website my boss wants to set up for the local city. It's one of those green hippy sites that boasts tracking your ecological footprint, and providing lots of cool stuff among other silly hippy things.

Vague, I know.

Anyway.


I set up the website on a web server in our lab, and it's up and running.
I'm using Windows Server 2003 with IIS.

My boss, seeing how much of a "techno wiz" I am, has requested I make some sort of "blog" for the site so the local hippies can post and interact with the hippy scientists. I immediately thought forums, and did some googling.

From what I have gathered, Simple Machines Forums is the more secure of the bunch. Security is a must, b/c eventually we'll me streaming environmental data onto the server and the site, and we want to make sure nothing happens to the data.

I spent most of the day reading up on how to set it up and then started on the task. I encountered some small barriers, but finally got PHP to work (yay!) and have been trying to wrap my non IT head around MySQL.

And that's my problem at the moment. I installed MySQL 5.2 but Im having trouble getting the service initialized. The configuration wizard errors out on me, the log file says something about table permissions.

Reading through all the stuff out there has brain fried me .


Mike, in case you are still reading. You know about this stuff. Anyway you could point me toward a help site to deal with my problem?

[Buck]

Nevermind, i found the problem with initializing MySQL. Now to learn how to use the blasted thing.

[Mike]

Pfffft, I just setup a Windows (2008) server with PHP and MySQL to see if I can see where things go wrong, but alas, all is working fine of course. After some password issues by the instance configuration wizard.
And now you've solved it already. Can you break it so I can have fun?

[Buck]

Oh ... way ahead of you.


Sadly, MySQL is working perfectly. And as far as I know, PHP is still working --- AND they are talking to each other. I even installed the forums.



Then I started to tinker with the permissions b/c some googling I did said to do so. But little did I know, it was for a different version of windows and IIS and low and behold I broke the whole thing. Just in time to pack up and go home for the day.


I ended up recreating a new website project in IIS and pointing it to the root folder as a quick fix till I get it sorted next week. The website's forums is low priority at the moment, tomorrow I is devoted to setting up some special smog analyzing equiptment for the field next week.

If you DO want to helm me... I'd love a quick review on how permissions work and what I shouldn't do (which I probably did and it broke! <,,,< ) over the weekend. And if you can help me fix what I did wrong, that would be great.


I'll go ahead and send you a PM with a link to the site.