Web Server

Web Pages

So now you’ve got an older computer on your home or business network with Linux running on it.  It’s not doing much, perhaps monitoring your network.  What else can you do?  Oh, as I find every day, the possibilities are endless.

One thing that most may think is hard to do, is set up a web server.  Yes, you can serve up web pages without having to sign up for a web-hosting service.  Do it yourself.

You can have them available on the net even if you don’t have a static IP address or even a domain name, just by using a dynamic dns service.  Or you can keep them available just to your private network.  Each user can have their own section to themselves.  I use one of mine for testing before moving them to whatever web hosting server that hosts the working site.  I have another one just for my personal site that I share with family & friends.

APACHE

Apache

One of the most famous of Apache is Geronimo, but we are not going to be discussing that Apache, but rather the most widely distributed and used web server software available.  It’s no accident that it holds this top spot, it not only works, but does a great job.  Much like myself.

Get it.  Install it.

Now if you’ve got Debian or Ubuntu (or derivitive) you can install with:  aptitude install apache2.  If you have a distro such as Red Hat, Fedora or Mandrake, you can use: yum install apache2.

I’m not going to go over the whole installation and configuration process here, but a wealth of that knowledge can be found here.  However, once you get the installation completed, you’ll be able to host your own web pages.

Additional Web Apps

Now that you’ve got your Web Server up and running, you can do so much more.  For starters, you can install Nagios for keeping tabs on your network.  You can install webalizer to keep stats on your web server.  I installed coppermine for serving up picture galleries (although, this also involved having PHP and mySQL being installed as well).  The possibilities are never ending.  Anything you’ve seen on the net, you can pretty much find an open source app to add to your own server.