Hi guys, I just wanted to relay a bit of information on how I set up my latest SAM install.

My Windows 10 workstation's hard drive crashed recently and a colleague told me about perhaps replacing it with an SSD drive, so I rushed out to my nearest computer retailer and bought at 500 GB SSD for about $90 CDN (yeah, probably too much these days but I can't afford to have to keep rebuilding Windows 10 every time I have a problem, so I'd rather spend the money and get a big SSD that will last me a long time (hopefully)).

I used to run SAM on a dedicated Windows 2012 R2 server PC and was using the same for a web server, but recently I got rid of that too because I needed a more up-to-date and fast PC to replace my aging DELL Inspiron media centre computer. I backed up all of my websites, installed Windows 10 on that machine and put the idea of ever running a website again almost completely out of my mind.

I thought to myself that I don't want to really spend the time to download and manually configure all of the extra stuff I need, and then it dawned on me that I could still use IIS, installed as a component of Windows 10, and install and configure MySQL, and PHP all separately. Then as I was researching this I came across an article mentioned using the Web Platform Installer to install MySQL and PHP. So I downloaded the Web Platform Installer from Microsoft and loaded it up and selected the latest versions of MySQL and PHP, and installed both of those, and I didn't have to perform any special configuration, except to go into PHP.INI and change my upload size restriction parameter and open the appropriate MySQL and Requests port (1221) on my router.

There it was. IIS running on my Windows 10 workstation with MySQL and PHP, all within about 15-20 minutes. To me, this was a very sweet thing as I remember struggling with the dedicated Windows server in the past.

Then I reinstalled SAM and set that up and added all of my music, then installed Icecast and set that up, and copied my website backup to the /inetpub/wwwroot folder, changed the permissions in IIS, and my site was back up and running within about an hour! I only use Icecast now because it's much less cumbersome to set up than the Shoutcast DNAS - don't get me wrong, I was a dedicated Shoutcast DNAS user but had way too many problems with it and was getting a lot of NAK errors.

I don't know about any of you, but if you want to save yourself the time and expense of trying to set up your own web server on a dedicated Windows Server PC, I encourage you to add IIS as an extra component of Windows 10, and install MySQL and PHP using the Web Platform Installer. It's so much easier, and it works with almost zero configuration! Because the SSD drive has no moving parts, installation can be a breeze, and very quick.

I would love to be able to connect with those of you who don't know how to go about doing this, just send me a PM and I'll be glad to help you.

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Park Magic Radio
http://parkmagicradio.ca