I’m getting increasingly annoyed by our web design and development lecturer’s apparent inability to parse and/or reply meaningfully to questions. Here’s the latest:

Hi redacted lecturer-name

Won’t world+dog know that the default MAMP server username and password are root and root? (Even worse, WAMP’s default password is null!) How can we reset these defaults so the websites we create in real-life aren’t so easily hacked?

For the coursework, I’d want to put my effort online so I can ask friends to test it.

1. is this allowed?
2. if so, macs have a built-in apache webserver. You can see my use of this at http://www.bruceryandontexist.net. Can I enable PHP on this? If not, how would I direct users to the version within MAMP?

Thanks
Bruce

The lecturer’s answer, in full, was

The wamp server on our computers isn’t connected to the world wide web so no-one can navigate to it from outside. The default password is only there as root during the development phase. One a project is competed it is moved to a production server which is connected to the www – security issues and concerns are dealt with at this stage.

Does this answer my questions in any way? The lecturer knows I don’t use the uni PCs. (For a start, you have to reload all files into MAMP each session, and that these files go into C:/Program Files where no luser should ever go.) He knows, because I’ve told him and he’s seen me doing it, that I develop on my MacBookAir and home mac. And I was clearly asking ‘how can we go live and user-test from our own computers?’, not ‘is it possible to go live from a uni PC?’

I’ve tried again and will let you know if I get any meaning response to

Hi redacted lecturer-name
To be clear, I mean to use one of my macs as a production server as well as a development server, so I could invite others to test it. (In the spirit of agile, I would ask friends to represent clients testing features as I develop them.)
I have no hardware PCs – the nearest I get is running Windows via BootCamp* on my mac laptop or Windows virtual machines (under VirtualBox) on my desktop mac at home. All my development for this course will be done on these machines. So

1. is asking friends to test what I do, as I do it, allowed – or would this be considered cheating by Napier?
2. If it is allowed, how do I get PHP working on a mac that’s a production server? Or can I use MAMP, and allow world+dog to see the site?
3. To prevent anyone hacking my website, how do I change the default passwords on the production server’s incarnation of PHP/MAMP?

I know that the coursework doesn’t require the website to go live, but if I do any real-life web development, the go-live step will be quite important, so I want to take the opportunity to practice this too.
Thanks
Bruce