Real Newbie Problem

baldur2630

Sorry folks, I'm trying hard to get to grips with Linux and all the various bits and pieces, but I'm a Novel eDirectory Engineer and I'm finding it very uphill at the moment!

I was running a Simple Machines Forum and a TT Express Helpdesk on an old Fedora 7 box. The box died, but I have a backup of MySQL for HelpDesk and Forum, so I bought a new shiny server and have installed (for the third time now) Fedora Core 8.

I've installed mySQL, Apache, Perl, PHP etc., but it keeps giving me uphill.

My first attempt seemed OK until I tried to install the Simple Machines Forum and I found I had done something (still don't know what) and Port 21 was unavailable for FTP only Port 22 over SSH2.

My second install also seemed OK but I couldn't access MySQL at all, but Apache and everything else seemed ok.

My third attempt is where I am now. I've installed everything and done all the things required on the SMF forum. MySQL is OK, I've recovered the database and it was looking good. The forum is on /var/www/forum If I go to http://myservername/forum/install.php, I was geting a Page Not Found error. If I went to http://myservername/index.html I got the Apache page.

I surfed everything I could find and eventually setup an alias /forum /var/www/forum, now, instead of getting Page Not Found, I get the sourse code of install.php in the browser window. In other words it doesn't execute the script - just displays it.

What have I / am I doing wrong. I'm a total novice, so I'm afraid it will have to be a words-of-one-syllable explanation.

Thanks in advance for anyone who will take a few minutes to help me here.

bpat1434

For starters, I'd suggest moving off of Fedora for your server. While it's a great desktop system, I find CentOS to be more stable for a server environment. It's RedHat's open-source server, like Fedora is RedHat's open-source desktop 😉

Anyway, it sounds like you either don't have php installed, or Apache doesn't know to handle .php files as a php script.

How did you install all this? Did you do it via YUM or did you do it manually? I prefer to build manually if I have the time; otherwise, I use AtomicRocketTurtle's Apache and PHP releases. Just read the page, and you'll see how to add it as a YUM repository if you want.

Otherwise, can you give us exactly what you did to set up Apache? Did you edit the httpd.conf and add:

LoadModule php5_module modules/mod_php5.so
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .php3 .php4 .php5 .phtml
PHPIniDir /etc

If not, you need to add those and then restart Apache. If they're there, try restarting Apache:

service httpd restart

If that doesn't work, then can you outline exactly how you installed everything, step-by-step, and if possible, what configuration flags you used?