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

[Greg Brown]

On 12/9/05, Chad Thomsen <chad.thomsen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Howdy.  Was thinking about hosting a web site at home on an old 400 P2
> pentium I have laying around the house.  Figured it would be a good way to
> futher my newbian knowedge of linux since I am primarly a
> Windows/AS400/Cisco guy.  Would probably load up some sort of lean distro
> and run apache.  Few questions though.
>
> 1. What is good software used to host a photos that you can browse easily.

I wrote my own perl script some years ago to create thumbnails from
large original photos and it kicks out a html page as well.  An
example out the output from this script is:

http://tbcorp.homeip.net/brown.net/pr/index.html

If you want the script I'll e-mail it to you or put it on my website
somewhere where you can right click and download.

> 2.  Good software for bloggs (doubt I will do blogging but figured I may as
> well ask)

I've used drupal for about two years now.  The only reason I selected
this software was I wanted a blog and I sat next to Mark Turner who
already had one and after about a two second "over the cube wall" talk
I had drupal downloaded.  I hear good things about MovableType as
well.

> 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).

Yup.  You'll have fun with PHP/Mysql.  Truly good stuff there.  I am
now trying to wrap AJAX around PHP and Mysql for some geeky goodness.

> 4.  Any issues with doing such a thing with Road Runner.

I haven't had any.  RR has been great.

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

dyndns.org is what I use for my beach and home network.  My dyndns
client runs on my M0n0wall firewall though.

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

Debian.  Get the Sarge network install CD.  For a beginner I would
stick with Debian (or maybe Ubuntu.. but for a server I'd still go
with Debian).  If you were to install a base system from network
install and you wanted to add something, like PHP, it is as simple as 
the following commands:

su - (to get to root)
apt-get install php

No RPMs, no dependency issues to stress about.. it's all good (and simple).

Greg

>
> Any opinions would be much appreciated.
>
> Thains!
>
> Chad
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