Server setup

[Draymire]

I am looking to setup a server that will not go online but will be accessed by my other computers through lan. I want to use debian as it seems to be a good choice for servers and i was wondering if i follow one of the guides, that i get when i google debian home server, will i be able to just hook a cross over cable to it and view my 'website' with another computer or do i have to set it up differently.

Thanks

guide i looked at

[Defience]

I think Thetan and mischief can help you out on this one.

[faazshift]

What it sounds like you want to do should be easily accomplished. You could either set your hosts file to point to your other computers ip for a specific address, or you could get into the dns stuff (my preference is BIND). Both options should work if your computers are properly connected (though you don't really need to use a domain if you just want to access the server; instead you can access it by ip). If you just want a one-to-one connection, then yes, a cross over cable would work.

[Draymire]

Thanks i will try that, gotta wait for some new parts first and the cross over cable.

[Goatboy]

If you're just getting into server stuff, I'd recommend Ubuntu Server version. It's a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server, which has all you need to make a website. It's very easy to set up, since all you need to do is make the CD and boot from it. The instructions are all there.

[Draymire]

Thanks Goatboy i will look into that.

[thetan]

If you're just getting into server stuff, I'd recommend Ubuntu Server version. It's a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server, which has all you need to make a website. It's very easy to set up, since all you need to do is make the CD and boot from it. The instructions are all there.

well, IIRC, the standard install of Ubuntu Server is pretty vanilla. However, setting up a complete LAMP stack is only a single command away:

Code: Select all

sudo tasksel install lamp-server


Personally, i'd recommend against using Ubuntu Server (or ubuntu at all) and instead just go pure Debian and install and configure everything on your own (it's even better imo if you compile everything on your own with `apt-get source` instead of `apt-get install`). Really IMO, using something that you don't have to setup, that just works, really really cheats you out of such a great learning experience. Once you attain fluency with these systems you can roll out all different kinds of stacks pretty fast and trivially too. IE, i can have a fully configured functional LAMP stack (+ WebDAV/SVN w/ post-commit scripts to push to live/dev site) + router/firewall stack on Debian or FreeBSD within a half an hour. Also, i've grown out of the LAMP stack, i don't like apache as much as i used to, lighttpd is my prefered web server, the recent Oracle acquisition of Sun and thus MySQL has been reason enough for me to install PostgreSQL on half a dozen of my servers and i find myself using linux less and less in favor of FreeBSD. So because i've worked hands on with these technologies so much i can switch back and forth between them relatively quickly and this is what you would be cheating yourself out of by using something that "just works"

[faazshift]

@thetan: Thats one of the biggest reasons why I love Gentoo so much, as well as the oh so amazing portage.