[TriLUG] Hosting web site on old machine at home??

[Scott Lundgren]

> 1. What is good software used to host a photos that you can browse 
> easily.
>
I use gallery 1.x from http://gallery.menalto.com/. It is OSS, the code 
is on sourceforge, the website is offsite.

> 3.  Is a 400 P2 128 megs of ram good enough for a lightly traveled web
> site.  Will not run a GUI to conserve resources.  Is this enough horse 
> power
> to MySQL/PHP.  I might though togather a VERY basic dynamic web site 
> just to
> tinker and learn PHP(if I can find time).

It's perfect and near what I used to run (450 P2, 512 Mb, 6 Gb). Now my 
development box is a (500 P3, 512 Mb, 40 Gb disk) with PHP 4.x, Apache 
2.x, MySQL 4.x installed. Occasionally I'll start X, and most 
applications work well enough. Open Office is the only thing I've seen 
that takes a measurable amount of time to start. But that's not your 
intent. I don't have any performance numbers about this configuration.

> 4.  Any issues with doing such a thing with Road Runner.
Check your service agreement if you're concerned about legality.

> 5.  What dynamic DNS service to you all use or is buying a static IP 
> address
> cheaper?

I was using the free service from dyndns.com. I was very happy with it 
so I bought their $25/year custom DNS solution so now my primary 
website & email is accessible through my hosting provider but if I need 
to get into my dev server I've got a subdomain just for it. There's a 
small client on the dev box that runs via cron to update it's DNS 
record when/if its IP changes.

> 6.  What distro of linux would you use for a project of this nature?

The 450 P2 ran Fedora Core 2. The 500 P3 is running FC 3 with legacy 
updates. If I was going to start the project fresh with older hardware 
I might pick Debian's Sarge release.