My company's IT department would be better named the "computer purchasing and LAN cable maintenance department" because that's just about the limit of their abilities.
In my division we just had a guy quit, and our headcount has been reduced by one this year, so we've got a user-less DELL desktop sitting around.
Division director has asked me (hobby programmer) to turn it into a server for the division's internal use.
Target functionality would be:
- MediaWiki
- Collabtive
- some sort of version control (maybe)
There is no budget for purchasing a proper server, hence the suggestion that we wipe the desktop and make do.
Went to talk to the "IT" Manager and he agreed to wipe it, install a fresh copy of WinXP, unlock the admin rights, give it a dedicated IP on the LAN, and then forget it existed.
In other words, if I break it that's my problem.
My server experience is limited to running unsecured XAMPP on a few home machines to test out PHP & JS code before updating my website. Refreshing my XAMPP understanding just now, I was struck by the constant WARNING: NOT MEANT FOR PRODUCTION USE disclaimers all over the place (both by the XAMPP team and others).
As XAMPP was my original plan (go with what you know...) I am now second-guessing the wisdom of that idea.
SO, I come, hat in hand, to serverfault
for some advice.
If you were in my position (mid-range desktop, fresh WinXP, need to host PHP & MySQL-driven webapps on a LAN) how would you tackle this problem?