I am setting up a web site to host from home and am planning on having a web layer that is port forwarded to port 80 and an application layer that is connected to the web layer through a LinkSys WRT310N router. The application server has php code that is called by the web server html files and, in turn, calls executables written in C++. I particularly want to protect the executables from hackers who might reverse engineer the code.

The web layer runs Windows XP and has WAMP installed. The application server has dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu. I was wondering which would be more secure for the application layer: Ubuntu or Windows 7. This may seem like a stupid question by I am a newbie to networking and to Ubuntu although I have used a fair bit of Linux and Unix in the past.

Many thanks in advance for any help,
Peter.

If you have no problems migrating what you have I would suggest starting over by taking Windows out of the equation and substituting it with any current, long term supported and well-hardened Linux distribution like Ubuntu LTS or Centos.

Thank you for your reply. I am leaning strongly towards using Ubuntu on the application server. However the web server, with Win. XP installed, is about 10 years old. I have not had any luck installing Unbuntu on old systems although my luck improves as I go to older versions of Ubuntu. It appears to expect more modern hardware to install properly. I'm not familiar with LTS or Centos.

Thanks,
Peter.

LTS in the post by unspawn above if in reference to Ubuntu, Ubuntu Long Term Support. CentOS is basically a free version of Red Hat.

One of the advantages of running Linux is that it supports multiple architectures and processor families and is backward compatible so ten year old HW should pose no problems at all (OK apart from "winmodems" and other hybrid HW/SW stuff). For reasons of performance, stability and security I wouldn't want you to be drawn to running WAMP (or run stale distribution versions) so if you list your HW specs* for both machines (boot the XP machine with a Live or installer CD) there may be suggestions in store.

* Minimally something like and save the file where you can grab / send it.