[CS-FSLUG] webservers

[David McGlone]

On Sunday 19 February 2006 8:08 pm, Alan Trick wrote:
> 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.

I used to resell hosting packages and had 2 websites through Hosting Matters 
but I dropped my web presence mainly due to lack of time. My Blog hardly ever 
got updated, and I decided to give it up.
>
> 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.

All this is the main reason I wanted to host my own site. I want the 
experience of working with DNS etc now that my time is somewhat getting more 
free with 1 of my kids in school now.

But for now I'm going to have to put all this on hold since I don't have a 
static IP.

I was going to use zoneedit, which would defeat the purpose to learn how DNS 
works etc, but I did sign up with them and tried it out of curiosity and they 
had a script I could run that would update my IP on their site each time my 
IP changed, but I didn't feel like messing with all that stuff because it was 
not what I was intending to do in the first place.

So for now I will just have to wait till I can get a static IP and a package 
from my ISP that will allow me to run a server.
-- 
David M.