Allowing access for Collaboration only

[zoeballz]

Hi there

Brand new member and new-ish to XAMPP too so please excuse my probably stupid question. I HAVE searched but most of the possibly relavent replies were several years old.

I'll start by saying I am NOT trying to use Xampp for a production site, but working on a private project building a massive database that I would like to allow 1 or 2 other people to access for collaboration only. Is there a way to basically refuse ALL access to everyone else to anything, except allowed people who would have ALL access ?

I only use Apache, PHP and MySQL. None of the other stuff whatsoever.

I have tried doing this by Windows Firewall rules (only allowing known pre-defined IPs) which seemed to work but then various functions stopped working properly e.g. PHP using FTP and WebDav. Thought I would try attacking this from a different angle even though I know XAMPP is not supposed to be "public". Is there a safe "best way" to only allow a couple of people access, only showing the ROTW a "Forbidden" page ? Or can XAMPP never be secure if open to possible public connections ?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Oh - Before anyone mentions it, Linux is not an option !! and the collaborators would need access to phpMyAdmin, in order to test queries.

Many thanks

Zoe

[Nobbie]

Everything is possible. Its all a question of the "design".

What do you mean by "refuse ALL access to everyone else to anything"? There are so many tools involved, so many so called "layers", you can of course restrict access to whatever you want. The question remains, where in your datamodell do you want to restrict access?

Do you want to restrict access to HTML sites?
Do you want to restrict access to files?
Do you want to restrict access to a SQL database?
Do you want to restrict access to an application?
And, and and and.... its quite endless.

You say "Firewall". A firewall does NOT restrict humans and persons, it restricts IPs in a network. So you see, its a total different approach than restricting access to files to certain human beings. As long as you dont have a detailed functional model for your application, we dont know anything and we especially dont know, which kind of restriction is meant.

You also speak about "connections", but these can be based on TCPIP, but it also can be based on sockets. What should be restricted and how? If we know precisely, what you want to protect, we can help you about that. But for the moment your request is extremely confusing and unprecise. What and where and who and how is meant to be restricted? There is no "everything" in this matter. Switch of all PCs. Thats a huge restriction for everything.

[zoeballz]

Actually I said almost exactly what I meant.

Allow 2 people FULL access to everything (so being able to see pages, run scripts etc, use phpMyAdmin) and FORBIDDEN to the rest of the world on EVERYTHING. NO access whatsoever. Nobody is to be allowed into a single thing except maybe a forbidden page (or nothing at all).

I guess what I didn't say was "Assume the allowed IPs are only the 2 people concerned" and that incoming access would only be allowed via port 80 (or perhaps another random unused port that bots are less likely to check).

If other people or IPs could not see anything even existed, that would be even better (thus I tried the firewall approach).

Many thanks.

[Nobbie]

Good luck.