Windows (again)...

Post by **dave** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 5:57 pm

On a bored whim I grabbed a vanilla Win2003 SBS host, installed PHP (with IIS CGI, GD, MySQL, IMAP, Sockets etc...), installed MySQL 5, created a database, downloaded FreeNATS into a web-published directory, edited config.inc.php, navigated to firstrun and "php tester.sh" 'd the non-threaded tester script.

And the result? Does it just work (all be it without any scripting or threading etc...)? Well unsurprisingly no.

But surprisingly almost.

Obviously any serious attempt to get Windows native support would involve re-hashing the threading (long live Posix!) but this was more a "proof of exactly how broken the concept is" sort of a test.

Immediately apparently working:

The UI
ICMP
DNS - through the new DNS API (woo hoo!)
HTTP - but very slowly (even slower than fopen should be it seems)
Graphs, reports and history

Immediately broken:

IMAP - the script just dies... Hmm
Test session recording (not the history - the underlying mechanism to stop multiple same node tests being run at once if one is still going and timing out)

So... there it is. It definately can't be easily hacked to Windows

It is however on the version 1.X wish list.

In the meantime see below for a shot of the proof of concept running (sort of) native in Windows.

Cheers,

Dave.