My relationship with Microsoft, and especially Windows, is a love hate relationship. For some inane reason, Microsoft continues to differentiate their server/desktop products. Yet, the code bases for those products are, in effect identical.
Microsoft’s separation of product lines ultimately hurts consumers. We wind up with identical products that are artificially limited.
Considering Microsoft’s latest pushes into open-source, free software, and the like, it surprises me that they continue with this mindset of restricting features. The worst offended is IIS. Even with Windows 8.1 Pro/Ultimate/Whatever, you are limited to (10) concurrent connections. Why??? All this ultimately does is push users to (free) competing products.
So, that’s what I’ve been tinkering with tonight. Some of my servers workstations which are running Windows 8.1 were also hosting IIS. IIS does this annoying thing of queuing up requests once you get beyond the max concurrent requests of 10. Again, I have to throw my hands up and ask why?? The simple solution, though, is Apache.
After a few hours of tinkering, I’ve switched this primary server over to Apache (LAMP) using Linux Mint running in a VMware 10 session. It really wasn’t that difficult to get the databases, certs, files, and configurations moved over. I can already tell that performance is better. Having virtualized servers, which aren’t crippled, is really the way to go.
Here are a few links I used as references for switching over to Apache/Linux:
StartSSL cert setup: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-apache-with-a-free-signed-ssl-certificate-on-a-vps
Apache URL rewriting to force HTTPS: https://wiki.apache.org/httpd/RewriteHTTPToHTTPS
Apache user/group permissions: http://fideloper.com/user-group-permissions-chmod-apache
Misc commands that came in handy:
a2enmod ssl (enable SSL module)
a2enmod rewrite (enable rewrite module)
service apache2 restart (restart apache)
mysqldump -u root -p --databases --add-drop-database databasename --result-file=outputfile