gorgon2k Posted October 2, 2012 Share Posted October 2, 2012 Ok guys I was approached by a client to create a web service that will allow users to sort through a bunch of proprietary data. This is all fine and dandy but the catch is, all of this data comes from software they have installed on local servers at their location. I'm thinking of writing a cron job to receive and parse the data at a set interval. The data can be accessed by way of an ODBC protocol but what I need to figure out is how the hell I'm going to get the data from the local server to a remote server. My initial thinking is, is it possible to straight connect to the local server, from PHP using the odbc_connect feature but I guess some how I'd need to have an address for the local server that is public facing? If this isn't an option would the next best thing be something that can parse the data and server it up, online, to be accessed via the remote server? I'm not much of an "I.T." guy so I'm not sure how I'd even go about making this local server accesible from the internet. Does any of this seem possible or do you guys know of any better options? Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RussellReal Posted October 3, 2012 Share Posted October 3, 2012 If it is a local server that your Client operates, he should be able to give you access to it. If he is able to give you access, you can most definitely connect to that "local server" as a remote server, as local to your php script the server that it is on is "local" and anything NOT LOCAL will be remote. You will not need a cron job if you have direct access to the local server's database, The local server will most likely need static IP and it will need to accept remote connections, if it doesn't accept remote connections you will need to configure that, you can do this thru ftp with the database configuration files, you could even do it with SSH, but that has a bit of a learning curve! If your client does not have access to this local server or he doesn't own it, I wouldn't take the job, because if you do parse the site, you're stealing their bandwidth. and although they will most likely not attack you for it, you are definitely doing something unethical, and they CAN come after you for damages if you do get discovered. - Russell Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adam Posted October 3, 2012 Share Posted October 3, 2012 You already said the answer: a web service. Just implement it on the remote server so that each of the local servers can POST data over HTTP, and the remote server will handle the ODBC connection. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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