Lacking the knowledge previous to this day’s endeavor, in an ultimate attempt to develop ASP on an existing Apache2 installation, i researched the options and my searching pointed to – mod_perl. What I installed the file named Perl-5.8-win32-bin-0.10.exe , a rather complex, self-extracting, “automatic” installation process.

I probably would have had more success had I not already had an Apache2 installation running on this system– but i did not realize that the aforementioned file would actually install not only the mod_perl file, but Apache2 itself as well– in addition to what appeared to be a PHP4 installation to boot!

Other files involved in the mod_perl installer were CPAN.pm (which i did not configure properly on this singular, unsuccessful installation) and ‘NMAKE.EXE’ for which NMAKE15.EXE was downloaded, apparently from Microsoft.com, extracted itself into a few other nmake files, NMAKE.ERR, NMAKE.EXE and README.TXT, all of which by default went into the directory path which i created for the purpose of this experimental installaion, under c:\mod_perl\Perl\bin\.

after the installation, which appeared to be a success at the time from the nature of the screen prompts, i was unable to do anything w/ that apache2 installation (meaning, i couldn’t browse to that severl which was named, not LocalHost but something ≇ GROUP1234 — which oddly enough, when i entered it into the address bar, i arrived at what must surely have been a Janapese web site. a very strange, unexpected outcome indeed!

frustrated not only by the inability to use the fruits of this rather complex installation procedure, but also of course the fact that i am no closer to developing with ASP on this system than i was several hours ago, i decided to delete the folders created during this mod_perl fiasco.

I should note also that my existing Apache Installation, which although seemingly pointed correctly at my PHP4 installation (the original idea for this box having been to allow for PHP4 or PHP5 development, interchangeably w/out too very much hassle) i could get no php pages to “parse”.

so, i decided to uninstall my Apache2 installation as well– the installation which was serving pages on LocalHost, but would not serve and parse PHP, so i ditched apache. if recall correctly i never had Apache, PHP, and MySQL functioning properly on this box yet.

Considering that my true need now is to be able to develop ColdFusion pages, and to work also with ASP pages, i’m going to install Windows XP’s built-in IIS server and see where that gets me! and so i’m off…