So I’m moving
January 12th, 2006
A couple things happened that worked out well. First and best, I’m moving upstairs to a new apartment with a dishwasher and a dining room (which will become an office) and a lot of other cool things.
Secondly, my totally awesome friend is giving me a server!
Now what?
Seriously! In my life I’ve never set up an web server from scratch, except for a Windows NT server about 7 or 8 years ago, and no way in hell is a Windows machine showing up in my home. Other than the office laptop, but you get the idea.
As much as I’d love a Mac Server OS, they run $500 and I can’t front that yet. Part of me wants to use Mac because (well) I use it and love it and it’s easy. Which may be all the more reason to not use it.
There’s an old O’Reily webdoc about getting started with Apache, and I know many places use that so I’m leaning toward it, myself.
I sort of have an idea what I need on the web server (see the list below), but after I made the list I laughed my ass off because I forgot… the server software. I have to ask said-friend what he uses, and I may just do that. It’s probably Free BSD or SuSE or something similar. I know the site that hosts Ipstenu.org uses some variant of bash.
So I made a list of what I need on a web server:
It doesn’t look like much, and I’m sure there are a million ‘little’ things I’m forgetting, but it’s a start and you need a start!
Categories: Smart Things
Wow! You have many, many fun-filled hours ahead of you.
I’ve been using Win98 on my dinky $200 server (1.4GHz Duron, 128MB RAM, 30GB HD) for three years now. Never been hacked. Of course I reboot once a week, but only as a safety measure. Never had a latch-up that wasn’t power glitch caused. Firewall, antivirus are always running too. Plus I’m behind a NAT router, so that stops all the non-standard port attacks.
I run Apache 1.33 for webserving, easily handles my six virtual hosts and five domains. Running Perl 5.6x too. With a 1.4GHz processor on the server, it’s plenty fast enough for the forums I run.
For email, I use Mercury, from Pegasus. Takes about 0.5 seconds per email so the 500 or so a day I handle doesn’t even register as a load.
I haven’t installed PHP, cause it’s so often the target of hack attacks as my logs show. Same for MySQL.
When I ran PennMUSH on the server, it still didn’t load the system noticably.
I have an FTP server install, but I don’t run it unless I’m on vacation. Even then I use non-standard ports to avoid hacking.
I think the most secure OS is OpenBSD, which has much tighter control over the kernal and driver coding, so changes are slow to come and frequently isn’t usable with the newest hardware.