scott.hodson.blog

So in order to get my blog software, Wordpress, to work, I had to get PHP5 to work on my server which is a Dell 750 PowerEdge server, with dual CPU 2.8GHz Xeons and 1GB of RAM, running Windows 2003 SP1 which, by deduction, means I’m running IIS 6. I downloaded PHP5 some months back because I was interested in working with PHP5’s newer object-oriented features working. But I had trouble getting IIS6 to work with PHP and after many hours gave up.

So as I revisited getting PHP to work on my IIS6 server again I was having some of the same problems. I visited several sites I had Googled (1 2 3) about getting IIS6 and PHP to work but I kept having the same problem. The issue was once I would hit a PHP script the browser would just hang up and all of my sites on that server would stop responding. Rebooted…restarted IIS several times to no avail. The clincher was that I found a mention on the PHP install notes to reset “IIS Admin” which, in turn, resets WWW, FTP and HTTPS services. This did the trick. So just restarting WWW was not enough, I had to stop IIS Admin and all of its subordinate services to get it to work, after, of course setting up PHP in the PATH, setting up Web Service Extensions, mapping the .php extension, yada yada. I also uninstalled the PHP5 I installed some months ago, cleaned out the registry and reinstalled using the manual (ZIP) install and not using the PHP Windows Installer. Not sure if that made a difference but it was one step I took.