Months ago I set up a WAMP server for testing our templates and other code.  Downloading a prebuilt package like WAMP Server or XAMPP, both free packages, made the entire process cleaner and painless, to a degree.  The install, though easy, required some specific changes to fit our purposes.

We used WAMP server for our setup on a Windows XP Professional box.  The install itself was simple and fast.  We needed to open up access on the firewall for WAMP.  We also set up Remote Desktop so we could remote in, when needed, via other workstations.  Our entire network is behind a router firewall, but to add an extra layer of protection we left the server’s firewall active.

We don’t need a DNS server, but we do have separate domains for different projects.  We setup the Hosts file on every computer accessing the server with the appropriate url and IP address.  The down side to this is everytime we change one of the subdomains we need to change the hosts file on every PC.  It works for now, but maybe we can figure something out in the future.

We also made sure the server had a static IP.  If the IP address gets reassigned, the Hosts file would need to be changed to compensate.  The static IP would keep the IP address until we changed it.

We set up a small script that shuts down the computer when we are done (saving energy is important to us) at the end of the day.  Very simple DOS script.

Lastly, we shared some folders that store our projects for the entire wired network.  Very important!

This was easy, the difficult part was installing Wordpress Mu, which isn’t saying much because that is relativley easy to install as well!

Look out for our post on installing Wordpress Mu!