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I am in the middle of major upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8 on my PC. Apart from a number of issues with IBM software and learning a totally new interface most of it has gone OK!. However one item which was really annoying was the migration of my test PHP environments.
I originally downloaded the latest version of Zend Server 6.0 for Windows which seemed to install OK on Windows 8 but gave me nightmares when trying to migrate my PHP websites over. The main problem is the lack of support from Aura for Zend Server 6.0 on Windows! I did correspond with Aura about when support would be available but at the time of writing we have no news. To overcome this we decided to download and install Zend Server 5.6 instead, the install went OK and the Easycom installer found the Zend install without any problems so we thought were were on a winner! Well that was until we tried to configure the VirtualHost containers.
In Zend Server 5.6, Zend appear to have changed the way that Virtual Hosts are configured, the way that we had been doing it for years seemed to work OK until we tried to connect to the websites from other devices. All we kept getting was the Zend Server test page, obviously something was wrong. When we looked at the configuration for the Apache server we found the following at the bottom of the config file.
Include “conf/zend.conf”
#ZEND-{090AFE0D4ABB5DFDCCB84641FE115680}
NameVirtualHost *:80
#ZEND-{9D752CB08EF466FC480FBA981CFA44A1}
Include “E:ZendZendServer/etc/sites.d/zend-default-vhost-80.conf”
#ZEND-{9D752CB08EF466FC480FBA981CFA44A1}
#ZEND-{090AFE0D4ABB5DFDCCB84641FE115680}
#ZEND-{C5D84B491DE9533AB5043B62C3D41057}
Include “E:ZendZendServer/etc/sites.d/globals-*.conf”
Include “E:ZendZendServer/etc/sites.d/vhost_*.conf”
#ZEND-{C5D84B491DE9533AB5043B62C3D41057}
Now obviously the ‘#’ generally denotes a comment so we should be able to ignore those lines, but the other lines are what caused the issue. The zend.conf file contains the virtual host definitions for the GUI which is run on port 10081 so we could understand what was going on there. The next line seemed to bring in another virtual host configuration, and finally the “Include “E:ZendZendServer/etc/sites.d/vhost_*.conf”” line brought in what should have been our defined virtual hosts.
Our configuration file called vhosts_shield.conf was added to the directory ‘E:ZendZendServer/etc/sites.d’ so according to the config file we believed that it would be added to the Virtual Host configuration, but it was still refusing to server up the sites. After some review and a lot of searching the web (even the Zend documentation and forums) we could not find out where we should place the virtual host content for it to be served up correctly. We would always be sent the default Zend page by the server regardless of the url entered. At first we tried to amend the zend-default-vhost to point to our own directory structure (this is the same as we have always set up) but that kept stopping the server from starting. Then it dawned on us, the configuration file seemed to be forcing the Zend page and ignoring our own vhosts file even though we believed it was being loaded. So we decided to force the default VirtualHost to run against a a nondescript port and only have our virtual host file (sites.d/vhosts_shield.conf) running against port 80. That was it, simply changing the port configured in the httpd.conf file for the VirtualHhost made it work.
So if you have moved to Zend 5.6 or above and you are using VirtualHosts the above will work for you. Eventually we will find out where Zend likes to have the site content stored and how the config files should be set up, but for now we are OK. The Aura incompatibility with ZendServer 6.0 needs to be resolved as well, as soon as we know when Aura will support this configuration we will certainly add a new post.
Happy PHP’ing..
Chris..