I do a lot of local development with Internet Information Services and either ColdFusion, PHP or ASP.net and for the longest time I would actually run the websites on separate ports on 127.0.0.1.

Unfortunately running multiple websites on various other ports causes some issues like:

• Port conflicts with other programs
• Remembering which port is used for what website
• Causes problems with some websites that look for port 80
• Doesn’t really work with SSL (port 443)

So what I started doing was running my websites on separate private IP addresses which are local to my machine only, and this worked GREAT! I could load up websitexyz, bind it to IP 1.1.1.10, setup SSL to work on port 443 for 1.1.1.10 and I would go about my business.

The only downside was when I would run out of IP addresses, because I would only add about 5 to 10 IPs at a time to my local loopback adapter. It is a bit of a pain in the butt to add a bunch of IP addresses in Windows, so it would take me a bit of time to do this everytime I needed more IPs.

That was until I ran into a small batch script which can add as many IP addresses as I want in a range.

Here’s the code:

FOR /L %A IN (41,1,100) DO netsh interface ipv4 add address “ColdFusion-IIS” 1.1.1.%A 255.255.255.0

Simply copy that into either a command prompt or a .bat file and run it to add as many IP addresses in a range that you want.

Here’s the break down of the script:

FOR /L %A IN (START,INCREMENT,END) DO netsh interface ipv4 add address “INTERFACE_NAME” IPMASK SUBNET

If we take a look at my script above we see that

• START = 41
• INCREMENT = 1
• END = 100
• INTERFACE_NAME = ColdFusion-IIS
• IPMASK = 1.1.1.%A
• SUBNET = 255.255.255.0

The D-Link DNS-323 network attached storage, what a fantastic device. With it’s ultra 500 Mhz ARM processor, 64 MB of memory, Gigabit Ethernet controller, and two SATA 2 3.5″ drive bays all in a little box about the size of a 360 power supply (that ugly brick) *kawaii!!*.

Any who. With a little tweaking, this little box can do so much more than just act as a: samba, ftp, iTunes, uPnP Audio/Video Server, and DHCP server. With a little effort you can go ahead and install yourself a copy of Debian on it and do… well… anything on it. But for those who aren’t as ambitious to void their warranty, you can still use a huge collection of ‘fun_plug’ programs instead.

I’m currently working with the chroot method of installing Debian, if I can avoid flashing a custom firmware and potentially having to install a serial port, both of which void your warranty, I’ll be thrilled.

I have Debian Lenny, Apache 2, and PHP5 currently installed. I’m just working on disabling a few things to get all of the above to work smoothly together.