[CS-FSLUG] webservers

[Alan Trick]

On Sat, 2006-02-18 at 08:37 -0700, David McGlone wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Does anyone here have any experience running a webserver?
> 
> I'm trying to set up a webserver on my machine so I can start my website back 
> up, I still have my domain, but I'm wondering how to set up the nameservers 
> and stuff to be able to completley host my own domain and webspace.
> 
> Anyone have any tips, tricks, How-to's?
> 
> David M.

As the others have said, it may not be worth the effort. You're probably
better off paying $30 a year for someone else to host it. However, there
are reasons for doing it. For one thing, it gives you a lot more
freedom. Many hosters have limititations because they have to support
lots of people.

At the school I work for I set up my own webserver (the website is
http://www.faith.edu.ph/). It's been a pretty good experience and has
alowed me to do cool things I otherwise couldn't have.

First thing is to find hardware. I found a 4-5 year old dumpy box that
wouldn't run windows well. The processor is not to important. As long as
it's a pentium 2 you should be fine, even lower should work if you not a
high traffic site. The most important thing is memory. I was setting up
Apache, PHP, and MySQL and the thing has 192 Mb. That's been more than
enough, but if you want more things like memcache or if you think you'll
have large databases, you might want to consider using more. Hard drive
space probably won't be important, just make sure you do regular
backups.

Then I went ahead and installed Gentoo on the box. That was pretty
normal (if you call gentoo normal). Gentoo is wonderful for this kind of
thing, just make sure you have something else to do. As far as
documentation, Gentoo is supurb and I have yet to find another distro
that even comes close. I had to recomple php once because the cms I was
using (CMS Made Simple) required pcre, but didn't have it listed.

I also set up ssh (which is awesome btw) and used it to work off of from
my own computer.

Then I built the actual website, tightened up the security to paranoid
levels, redirected the dns servers, and the thing has worked great. The
only problems I've had were blackouts, and I accidently upgraded mysql
to 5 so I had to downgrade it.

I was also able to set up htdig and use it as a search engine and put
all of our yearbooks up on the website
(http://www.faith.edu.ph/tiwalan/). There's more than 10,000 images
there, something I could have never done with an external web host.

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