I couldn't find a good forum for this question, in short I'd like to set up a windows laptop as a server for my threads 6.4 environment. FWIW - I have a TON of mod's.

I'm doing some more presentations now and I'd like to set up my Windows laptop with my complete web site, which includes three threads sites. My brother is helping me, I guess the ticket is LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP). We feel pretty comfortable making the laptop ready for the site.

The question is, whats the best way to get all my tables and code loaded? Is anyone else here running on Windows? I'm a techie but this is a bit out of my league.

I'm using this laptop as a server at an Expo on March 3,4. Internet access is too expensive and I cant get a wireless signal there.

THanks

You could always use Win XP, Apache, MySQL and Php - it's what I use to test on this here notebook. Very easy to setup and you're up and running in a few hours. You then access your site via:

http://localhost/

I use EasyPHP or UniformServer; they're a PHP/MySQL/Perl/Apache all in one which ship together, it works rather well.

What steps do you take to transfer the database and code to my new laptop server? I assume there are some export/import tools but I dont know where to look for this, or am I just being an ignoramus here?

If you have an ssh connection to your site you can backup the data, zip, download and unzip to your local install. Does that make sense?

I dont know what ssh is, but I'm sure I can figure it out! Thanks Allen, hope you are well

I'm doing well, thank you

SSH (Secure Socket Shell) is an app that allows you to basically have command line access to your site. You can do pretty much the same thing with other programs (backup database, zip it, transfer) but ssh is *much* faster. There are a list of common commands for ssh here:
http://www.jiffynet.net/faqs/sshcommands.html

It really sounds more technical than it probably is, if I can learn it most anyone can. I used to try to manually backup databases using phpmyadmin and download then manually add the lines back in for the site we were moving to - would take hours and hours and hours. With ssh you can backup the database, move, and re-install in less than one hour. I use this app:

Absolute Telnet/SSH - works pretty well and is pretty quick to learn.

Groupee used to have step by step instructions on how to back up and move a site, but I can't find it.

Id make an SQL dump from the server and then import that to MySQL on your laptop, then copy your ubb files to your webserver on your laptop, then set the proper paths/connection data in includes/config.inc.php

That makes much more sense to me, thanks guys. Believe it or not, I do this for a living, sort of. Right now I'm designing a Business Objects universe where I have to help create an ETL from one Oracle database to an ODS and then write a bunch of reports against it. Though I dont actually do the physical move I write the data mappings and what not. So principle I understand it, I should be able to fudge my way through. Thanks again!

lol sounds good ...

I run Uniform Server on http://home.corthell.net/ and it works fairly well, it's on WXP Pro SP2 so you can see it in action; I just do some dev there so theres not much...

I have several other web servers that i play on as well