PHP Installation guides for IIS are a dime a dozen on the Internet these days (though there are only a handful I've seen that I'd consider accurate), however there is not a lot of guidance for uninstalling PHP from IIS. Being able to fully, and cleanly uninstall PHP from your Windows environment is very important for troubleshooting and ensuring a clean environment to do PHP upgrades. This guide details the steps you need to take to fully and cleanly uninstall PHP from IIS.

I've always been a bit of a geek for performance analysis and testing. There is just something about squeezing every last drop of performance out of an environment that I find a very interesting challenge. With IIS 7 now taking over the crown of being the flagship version of Microsoft's webserver from IIS 6, I was very keen to read the Microsoft.com Operations Performance Analysis of IIS 7.0/Windows Server 2008 as there are but a handful websites in the world that get higher user traffic. Of key interest was that using IIS 7 the Microsoft operations team were able to service 31.4% more HTTP requests than on IIS 6, and this all using the same hardware. Definitely worth the read!

There is some debate whether or not the www prefix should be used on your domain space, there is at least certainly no technical reason why this would be required as it is simply DNS configuration. One thing that should not be up for debate though is that you should ensure that your users are able to access your sites in a consistent manner regardless of whether you us a non-www or www name space. In this this guide we'll use ISAPI Rewrite for IIS to show you how to redirect all your non-www requests to your www address. For example, if a user tries to access your site via http://example.com they will be redirected using the 301 HTTP status code to http://www.example.com .

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.

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.