Dizkus

Help me. This is on my company laptop and I connect to the (huge) company network every morning. I know I may have created a gigantic security issue that I would probably get jetisoned for. (Installing any software app is verbotten).

What do I need to do to ensure that I haven't opened up a hole in this company?

Thanko,
David

well, if you only reference it via localhost, xampp and PN shouldn't generate any security holes.

If you add other software, that may be an issue.

xampp is really nice because you can run a fully-blown environment that will support PN entirely on your laptop w/o any network or server dependencies. I use it to demo websites to customers. Much less stressful than depending on the customer's network.

From the technical perspective you could simply configure apache to only allow connections from localhost (127.0.0.1). Now if you're not sure how to do that then you could indeed possibly introduce a security hole (depending on the default configuration of xammp and any changes you've made). With administering a server comes a certain responsibility to maintain it's security. Servers aren't something you install and forget....

From the perspective of someone who manages a large network my response would be policies are policies; they're not there for you to decide if they apply to you or not. If your company has a stated IT policy then you'd be in breach of it regardless of if you introduced a security hole or not. The policy probably states that you're not allowed to install your own software not you're not allowed to install any software that introduces a security risk to the company.

-Mark

What Mark said.

Best thing to do is to go to the IT folks and say that you have this package and want to install and configure it so that it isn't a problem. They ought to be able to work with you to do it.