XAMPP breaks local networking.

[adrianww]

Hi there,

I've just installed XAMPP 7.2.4 on my trusty old Mac Pro (running Mac OS X 10.11.6 - El Capitan) and whenever I start the Apache server, I lose access to my local network. Within a couple of minutes of Apache coming up, any network traffic destined to go outside the machine seems to end up in a black hole. Can't access the Internet from a web browser, can't ping the router on the local network, nada. Stopping Apache doesn't fix it - I have to stop Apache and turn wifi off and on again to regain access to the rest of the local network and the outside world.

I think that the default Apache configuration must be doing some weird bit of one-off fiddling with the network stack or routing on my machine as it starts up. I've searched on here for reports of anything similar and have drawn a blank, so if anyone has any ideas what might be happening, I'd be grateful.

Thanks!

[adrianww]

Hello again,

Just in case anyone else runs into this, I have a little more info. After a bit of testing, I have discovered that it isn't XAMPP or the Apache server per se that is causing the problem. It's something to do with PHP and - more specifically - phpinfo().

The test page that I was loading in order to check that everything was up and running included a call to phpinfo(). If I leave out the phpinfo() call, the local network on the machine continues to work normally. Even more to the point, it's something to do with phpinfo() when it's called with the INFO_MODULES parameter (or the default INFO_ALL, since that includes INFO_MODULES). It also only occurs when it's being called in the context of a web page - it doesn't happen when using "php -i" at the command line.

Unfortunately, I still don't know what the actual root cause of the problem is, nor how to fix it (other than to avoid calling phpinfo() whch isn't a big deal since most folks don't use it much other than for debugging, etc.) I'm just hoping that the same thing isn't going to crop up as a result of any other PHP functions that are more widely used.

In any case, it looks like it's some kind of weird PHP problem on Mac OSX El Capitan (or even just on my specific machine), rather than something more general. That'll explain why I haven't yet found any descriptions of anything similar anywhere else.

If I ever get to the bottom of it and work out what's actually going on here, I'll post an update. In the meantime, I at least have a working dev system that I can use (so long as no other PHP functions start causing the same problem!)