Here is my tale of woe.
I’m in charge of a website written in PHP/HTML and running a MySQL database for the e-store. This was written by a third party who is no longer available.
The server is running W2k3 Server, and IIS 6. I also have a couple of other straight HTML websites and my email server (MailEnable) running on the same box. MailEnable uses ASP.net to run it’s webmail application.
Note that I’m the network, AS400/PC programmer, and admin guy. My HTML and ASP (classic) skills are medium to low, but my PHP, MySQL, and ASP.net skills are pretty much zilch.
A couple of weeks ago all the websites on this box (even the ones written in straight HTML!) started showing the message “Service Unavailable” for every page, which I traced to some error in ASP.net. I finally wound up uninstalling and re-installing IIS and ASP.net. This fixed the error with all the websites except the one written in PHP. It just gave me a “Page not Found” error. So I figured this is because PHP is no longer hooked up correctly to my site in IIS.
I then re-installed PHP 5 (5.2.1.1) (which may have been a mistake, I think it overwrote my PHP.ini file). But it didn’t change anything in IIS. So after screwing around a bit I manually created a “Service” under IIS called PHP, with the only required file being php5isapi.dll in the folder where PHP is installed (this folder is also in the windows path). Next I went to the properties for the website using PHP and added an ISAPI Filter, also called PHP, and set the executable to the same DLL.
Now the PHP website will display pages. But I have no idea if I’ve done those things correctly or completely.
But now if you click on any link that needs to get something from the database (such as adding a product to the shopping cart) it fails. I’m now assuming that PHP is no longer correctly talking to the MySQL database, probably because I overwrote the damn ini file when I reinstalled PHP.
So, can anybody tell me in short words how to make PHP talk to MySQL? And how about the way I manually put the PHP service and ISAPI Filter into IIS? Is that the correct way?
Or if someone who is knowledgeable about IIS/PHP/MySQL wanted to volunteer to log onto my server and take a look at things, I’ll set up a login via RDP, and I’d be very grateful.