Setting up a Linux Web server
What a week. I've run into some interesting challenges setting up a new combination weblog/magazine site called VarLinux.org, a nonprofit portal dedicated to serving the VAR and channel communities. (For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a weblog is a site where a community gathers to share news links and other information.) I've also decided to host my own mail server, petreley.com, which means I've been out of touch with most of the world while I've been busy setting everything up.
I'll share my war stories on getting everything working over the next few weeks. I hope you'll be able to learn from my mistakes when setting up your small office/home office (SOHO) or medium office/field office (MOFO).
I'm starting small by running these sites from my home office. I put together a 1 GHZ Athlon machine for about $750, and ordered DSL with a 384K uplink in order to host two domain name servers and the site. All my machines are running various distributions of Linux. My name servers are running BIND 8.2.3, which runs as a nonprivileged user, so they are safe from the recently overhyped Linux Lion worm that infects poorly configured name servers. I'm using Apache 1.3.14 for my Web server and will probably start VarLinux.org with a custom version of PHP-Nuke 4.4.1a as my publishing system (please see Resources for more information).
I want to control my own domains, so the first thing I had to do was set up name servers. In doing so, I was suddenly introduced to the concept of classless subnets. Domain name service (DNS) is not designed to work with blocks of fewer than 256 addresses. The idea behind classless subnets is that they allow an ISP to delegate authority over a small number of IP addresses to a site (my subnet contains eight IP addresses, but only five of them are available for servers and workstations). But you and your ISP have to play some tricks to make this work.
It took a couple days for me to fully grok classless subnets. Unfortunately, it's not enough to understand how they work in order to set up your name servers. You have to know how your ISP has configured your specific set of IP addresses. You'll need to contact your ISP's DNS administrator for that information.
That introduced the first of two serious obstacles: the automated phone navigation system of my ISP -- Pacific Bell Telephone Co. No matter how many combinations of phone menu choices I tried, I was routed back either to where I started or to a person who couldn't help me. The only way I could get any useful answers was to search the PacBell Website for email addresses that looked like they had something to do with DNS, and send questions by email. (I had to use my PacBell email account, since petreley.com wouldn't work until I had
Symantec Backup Exec 12 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 deliver industry leading Windows data protection and system recovery. Download this whitepaper to find out the top reasons to upgrade and how to get continuous data protection and complete system recovery.
Data and system loss — from a hard drive failure, malicious attack, natural disaster, or simple human error — can happen anytime. Don’t leave your business vulnerable. Make sure you have a secure recovery strategy in place. Symantec's latest backup and system recovery technology can efficiently restore critical applications, individual emails and documents and even restore your entire system in minutes in the event of a loss.
Businesses face a growing challenge to ensure that the IT environment is properly protected. Backup Exec 12 integrates with other applications in the Symantec family of products, to complement your current data protection strategy, keep your data securely backed up and make it recoverable when you need it most.
