Hi. I have recently atarting learning PHP and thus have Apache installed. To allow it to run I have to give my firewall permission to allow server rights to Apache.exe, Apache HTTP server, mysqladmin.exe and mysqld.exe. At present I shut down Apache / MySql while connecting to the internet. Am I being paranoid or is this the right thing to do? If the latter, is there anything that can be done to secure one's computer while running Apache / MySQL ? (I dont serve web pages to the world, just to myself for testing my PHP code). Thanks

Change the apache config file so apache only listens on 127.0.0.1 aka "localhost".

Thanks Jake I saw the following lines in httpd.conf: # # Listen: Allows you to bind Apache to specific IP addresses and/or # ports, in addition to the default. See also the <VirtualHost> # directive. # # Change this to Listen on specific IP addresses as shown below to # prevent Apache from glomming onto all bound IP addresses (0.0.0.0) # #Listen 12.34.56.78:80 Listen 80 Do I simply change Listen 80 to Listen 127.0.0.1 (not sure what the line above means but it seems to be a comment from the the # sign). 80 is a port number and 127.0.0.1 is an IP address so not quite sure if this is the right thing? Is that it? I dont need to reconfigure the MySQL server? Thanks for the tip.

Ya, change Listen 80 to Listen 127.0.0.1:80.