RoundCube Webmail is an web based IMAP client that uses AJAX to provide a drag and drop interface that operates very much like a regular desktop application. RoundCube is Open Source and PHP based using a MySQL or Postgres database for data storage with a presentation layer that is fully skinnable using XHTML and CSS 2. Feature wise RoundCube includes things such as multilingual support, MIME support, personal address book, folder management, message searching and spell checking just to name a few. I've been using RoundCube for several years now to access my personal email from all corners of the globe, and I absolutely swear by it which is why I've decided to write this install guide for IIS.

I recently brought a new Dell M1330 laptop which came preloaded with Windows Vista. The problem with preloaded operating systems is that they almost always come configured with a load of trialware software which is often restricted feature wise and consumes considerable system resources. This aside I wanted to put Windows XP SP2 onto my Dell M1330 as I had several applications that weren't Vista compatible which I used on a regular basis. The problem was that my new Dell M1330 used the new Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) for which there are no drivers on the Windows XP Professional SP2 installation CD, and as my Dell M1330 has no floppy disk drive I wasn't able to load additional drivers when installing XP which brought me to a stalemate. The only option from here was to slipstream the AHCI SATA drivers into my Windows XP installation which is what I'll cover in this article.

By default IIS is installed to run using the credentials of the iusr_machinename user account for anonymous access and is configured with the least amount of privileges required to run a website making it ideal for a lot of smaller environments. Sometimes though it is necessary to configure multiple IIS user accounts to segregate web applications and/or users to increase security. Although the task of creating a new IIS user account while ensuring that it is only granted the minimum privileges to the system might sound like a complicated task, it is in fact quite easy as far as system administration task go. In this article we'll look the five steps involved in creating user accounts for IIS 6.

Cacti is an open source PHP/MySQL based graphing and monitoring solution designed to utilise the very powerful RRDTool data logging tool by Tobias Oetiker. Using RRDTool, Cacti is capable of graphing and monitoring everything from network interface usage to temperature. Basically anything that can log data in a format RRDTool can read can be graphed and monitored by Cacti. In this guide we'll look at the steps necessary to install Cacti into your IIS environment.

Further to the article I wrote last week on how to install ImageMagick for IIS, I thought I'd continue along the same track this week and create a guide to install NetPBM for IIS. Like ImageMagik, the NetPBM package is a suite of executables which allow the manipulation of image files and is used by a variety of photo gallery style web applications (especially PHP based applications). In this guide we'll show you how to install NetPBM on Windows so that you are able to use it with IIS and your web applications.

ImageMagick is a popular bitmap image manipulation suite that is used for managing images for many web applications such as the PHP based Gallery 2, Coppermine and Qdig just to name a few. While PHP does have it's own image manipulation functionality with the GD library, it does come at the cost of performance (especially on larger images) and doesn't have quite the flexibility that the Imagemagick suite offers. In this guide we'll detail how to install ImageMagick on your Windows system so that it is available to IIS and your web applications that are able to use it.

Previously using PHP4 with FastCGI I was using eAccelerator as my PHP opcode / bytecode accelerator as APC was too unstable causing several crashes a week. However since upgrading to PHP 5.2.5 using ISAPI I have migrated across to APC and to date have found it to be very stable. So I thought it about time that I cover the topic of installing APC into your PHP environment for IIS, which is what we'll cover in this article.

Last week I wrote about the different location in Windows where php.ini is loaded from. The values set in your php.ini configuration file are global and will be set for every PHP environment on your server. What happens though if you want to configure different PHP environment settings for each site on your server, or even different PHP settings for directories within a site? This can be done with the ini_set() function, but as not all of us are coders or have the time to work code modifications in there is another option; the registry, which is the method which we'll be looking at in this article.