Mac How To: Home Server, Home Web Site - $799 And $7.00 A Month (Mac360)

[MacBytes]

Category: Tips and How To\'s
Link: Mac How To: Home Server, Home Web Site - $799 And $7.00 A Month (http://www.macbytes.com/link.php?sid=20041222095845)
Posted on MacBytes.com (http://www.macbytes.com)

Approved by Mudbug

[Mudbug]

I edited the thread title in the forums only to let you guys know where it linked. Some have been quite vocal about not wanting to read this site, but they still offer newbies some decent tips on how to better use their machines.

[Peyote]

I edited the thread title in the forums only to let you guys know where it linked. Some have been quite vocal about not wanting to read this site, but they still offer newbies some decent tips on how to better use their machines.


Thank you mr. macrumors editor

a good idea

[dashiel]

before anyone rushes out and does this, be aware that setting up a web server is usually against the terms of service agreement you signed when the cable/telco installed your service. if you do this they can terminate your service without notice. also some broadband providers will block incoming traffic to port 80. it's not very likely you will get caught, unless your site becomes very popular or your serving DiVX rips of episodeIII. just a word of warning.

[Mudbug]

my G5 at home is serving up my personal site (http://www.podification.com), and I've set it up pretty much the same way. They've skipped the part in this explanation on how to make password-protected sections (which you'll probably want to do if you put things like a music collection online), but otherwise, this would give someone a pretty good idea how to run their own website.

[tpatricks]

I think Jack did a decent job of condensing the process to set up a web server in the home. It's not for everyone, of course. But it's not brain science or rocket surgery, either.

Setting up a lowly eMac as a home server is remarkably simple these days, thanks to Mac OS X, Open Source, and inexpensive net connections.

I know Jack wants to do a follow up with more detail in the next day or so.

Even though you can set this up in minutes (getting the domain name takes a couple of days) there are other issues to consider.

• Security: a home firewall would be nice ($60)
• PW protected directories (newbies need to do some reading)
• Bandwidth limits: there's more coming in than going out (usually)
• Email: Not as hard as it seems at first (try PostFix Enabler)
• EULA: Cable/DSL folks don't want you serving porn

Still, that's enough to get a very capable home web server up and running for not much money.

Before moving Mac360 over to a dual 2.0 ghz PowerMac G5 we used a setup very similar to that (though we opted for the point and click of Mac OS X Panther Server-- worth it) on a DSL connection with static IPs.

Any MacBytes users with other setup tips, gotchas to look out for, do's and don'ts?

[2GMario]

this is also probably for personal use where the integrity of the data matters, but not that much

Running our own server on Adelphia Cable or now we have Verizon DSL, would be decent, but dont forget ur upload speed.

Adelphia cable had decent download speed, but upload speed was crap, around 20kbps

Verizon is better with download around 1700kbps but upload is still around 400kbps (dont quote me on these figures, only going by what my router tells me)

needless to say, the only thing a user will be sending to your server (your download speed) is some HTTP get and post requests, where what ur server is sending to the user (your upload speed) entire web pages with pictures and what ever else you host.

like i said, this may be fine for your own personal site, but dont think about running even a small public site off of this.

We pay rackspace.com quite a bit at $550 a month to host our small business site - on a amd 2400 processor, 1gb ram and dual 36gb scsi raid 1 hard drives with red hat linux enterprise and all the fixings (mysql, php, apache, etc...) but with that price comes security

rackspace offers amazing support (24 hours a day, 7 days a week), i have yet to see my site go down for even 1 minute in the last 6 months. with that price we got a dedicated backup server that runs twice a day, and 100mbits / sec both upload and download.

(no i dont work for rackspace) but that coupled with the fact that their servers are linked to 2 oc 12 lines, 2 oc3 lines and a fiber optic network, u cant really beet it.

my only gripe is we had to run AMD or Intel but no option of apple servers. i was even willing to send them my dual g5 but they wouldnt go for it.

on the other hand, we do run a private G5 server for testing and i have some tips on it.

if ur serious about doing this, get OS X server. it makes everything ALOT easier to do.

read the manual - as easy as macs are, and as much as OS X uses apache, its not quite the same when u have a GUI to play with. we once spent 5 hours trying to figure out why we couldnt map a domain name to the proper web folder and it was due to missing a . at the end of a string.

our G5 is setup in such a way that we use the airport extreme card to use the G5 as a regular workstation, and we have a separate netgear wireless access point on the ethernet port that routes traphic for the test server, which is what OS X Server apache / dns and dhcp listen on.

works out well for us.

but if u go with OS X Server, definately read the manual properly. will save u alot of time

just my experience
-Mario

[iBook]

Is there a manual with the step-by-step process of setting up a Mac to serve as a Web server? I would like to setup a server of my own, but I'm not the most tech-savvy person in the world... :o

Thanks...