232 CHAPTER 8 INSTALLING AND (Web hosting reseller) CONFIGURING PHPBB
232 CHAPTER 8 INSTALLING AND CONFIGURING PHPBB come across plans that offer hosting on a BSD-based server. BSD operating systems generally offer improved performance, reliability, and security over a Linux server. If you decide to use a Windows Server-based host, rest assured that phpBB does indeed run under Internet Information Services (IIS), but you will experience a small delay when you log in to your forum, and performance is not guaranteed. Plus, if you run into a problem with your board, it may be harder to troubleshoot under IIS, mainly due to the nature of the community, which typically uses Apache. If at all possible, install Apache on Windows and avoid IIS altogether (which I generally recommend due to IIS s history of being vulnerable to attack). PHP Interpreter:Version 4.4 The current releases of phpBB, as of this writing, are fully supported on the 4.x series of the PHP engine. I recommend that you have at least PHP 4.3.10 installed, because earlier revisions of PHP prior to 4.3.10 are vulnerable to some nasty exploits (manifested in the form of the Santy worm in late 2004, which targeted phpBB installations and defaced them). Caution The most recent versions of phpBB 2.0 no longer support PHP 3. If you still have PHP 3 installed on your server, note that it is not actively maintained. I strongly recommend that you migrate to the 4.3.x series. While PHP 4.3.10 is a good minimum, shoot for PHP 4.4, which offers improved performance and contains all of the features of the PHP 4.3 series. If you lease space from a hosting service and find an earlier version of PHP installed on your server, I recommend contacting your host provider and lobbying heavily for an upgrade to PHP 4.4. If you run your own box, it s time to bite the bullet and brave a little downtime to upgrade PHP the security of your box should be worth it. (Security is covered in Chapter 10.) Note In late 2004, the PHP project released the first iteration of the PHP 5 series of interpreters. The latest versions of phpBB 2.0 currently operate under PHP 5 with no known ill effects; however, this configuration, as of this writing, is not officially supported by the phpBB Group. The upcoming phpBB 3.0 (code-named Olympus), tentatively slated for release in early 2006, will fully support PHP 5. Database:MySQL MySQL is by far the most widely used database in the phpBB universe. Like phpBB, it is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). MySQL 4.1 includes a number of performance and feature improvements. It s still a new release, so some hosts may not have migrated to it yet. If your host doesn t have MySQL 4.1, don t fret; phpBB works at the very least with 3.23.58 (which is the version my production host uses). Although MySQL does not come with some of the power-user features of PostgreSQL and Oracle, it still performs just fine for a great majority of users. Plus, MySQL is a part of just about
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