Running a Server from Home

I got an itch to create a working server out the old computer my sister replaced after reading many “how-to guides” on digg. My sister replaced her old 800 Mhz Pentium III with a new tower that was even faster than mine! However, I wasn’t able to justify why I should get the new one since I work so much more on my iBook. My iBook may be slower, but I am much more productive in the OSX environment. I just wish I had another Mac with a bigger display, there’s no better upgrade than upgrading your existing display.

The spare computer

So I took that tower and paired it up with my old 17″ LCD display that came with my PC, but ever since I got that new 20 incher from Dell, it’s been collecting dust. The first thing I did was format the hard drive. Windows XP was sluggish on this machine and was not the right operating system to run a server. Since I was a newbie at this server stuff, I finally decided on using a distribution of Linux to run on the machine. I tried experimenting with FreeBSD on it, however the learning curve was way too steep and I did not have the time to mess around with that OS beyond one week. FreeBSD seems like the ideal OS for a server since it’s security is reputable, however my coworker suggested I just start off with Linux first since I wasn’t going to be handling any transactions yet.

FreeBSD undergoing some configuration

I installed Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper) on it since I had those free CDs I requested lying around and I read that it wasn’t a bad distro for server purposes. After it was finished, I installed Automatix, it helped install some needed general applications easily without having to deal with the terminal. Once everything was running nice and smoothly, I started to get into setting it up as a server.

Thanks to digg, I found this really simple to follow tutorial on how to turn Ubuntu 6.06 into a server. I followed through with the tutorial and got webpages (including those coded in PHP) working no problem and even installed various content management systems on it like Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla.

A picture of the old machine behind the server

Performance wise, the old machine works decent but it doesn’t beat the hosting GoDaddy has to offer. Although the hosting isn’t the greatest, it is much more reliable and downloads run smoother than downloading from locations outside my local network. With that said, I’d like to conclude by saying that unless you have a super fast broadband connection (uploading must be strong) and you have a good machine behind the server, all of this will work well as a development server at best.