Serving up PLC data on the internet....

At my mill site, we are currently providing plc data to users of the company intranet by saving an excel spreadsheet with DDE links through RSLinx OEM to a webpage on our common network drive with a macro every minute.

I would like to use OPC with PHP and MySQL with an Apache server on my machine to increase the power of the webpage and put more control over information presented into the hands of each user. Our Win NT corporate intranet is administered from head office about 700 miles away. My computer is just another machine on the network, and I was wondering how hard it would be to run an Apache server on it that could be accessed by anyone over the intranet or even at home over the internet. Is anyone else out there doing something similar already?

I know I'll figure this out, but if you have any pointers I'd love to hear them. Needless to say im looking for an Open Source solution......

I don't know about the data side of the question (php, mysql) but apache is certainly easy to set up and run.