Yay! I set up my PC as my own Webserver

[Jspafford]

I am seriously thinking about hosting my own site and losing my hosting account. Just keep the domain name so people can find me.

It was very easy with Vista.

Now I am trying to setup to share my photos/music/videos, etc.

I am such a geek.

 

[grey ghost]

what type of site would this be? another ranger site?

 

[Wicked_Sludge]

ive always wondered if a regular old desktop could act as a server...

 

[rboyer]

ive always wondered if a regular old desktop could act as a server...

Alot of the "custom built" rack servers out there are for the most part just desktop components inside of a case which has a mounting flange on the front of it.

 

[Jspafford]

69.47.50.154

 

[bmacsys]

Alot of the "custom built" rack servers out there are for the most part just desktop components inside of a case which has a mounting flange on the front of it.

Yes, but good quality components if its mission critical. Redundant power supplies. ECC ram, SCSI drives etc... All off the shelf items. Nothing proprietary. Commodity items. GOOGLE has like a half million 1U rackmount servers scattered across the globe in server farms. Imagine their electricity bill to run these machines and air conditioning bill to keep them cool.

 

[LearjetMinako]

I would like to setup a FTP server for my uses. So this way, at just about any terminal I can easily grab files from my HDD and use at work. Or transfer massive amount of data.

I'll probably do it sometime in 2010 when Intel releases their new CPUs'.

 

[Jspafford]

I am doing that too... Now that I have the website working I plan on making subfolders, such as http://IPADDRESS/music or http://IPADDRESS/photos

It is like an FTP, but the files will just be in a folder where someone can right click/save as.

 

[Simple_serf]

It was very easy with Vista.

I am such a geek.

No.

A true geek would have spent 3 weeks recompiling Gentoo 327 times before the damn thing would even be stable.

I know several people who run server clusters using plain old desktop parts. What makes it great is that you build the redundancy into the cluster.

Personally, i wouldn't consider using windows as a server, but that's just me.

 

[Evan]

ive always wondered if a regular old desktop could act as a server...

Sure can. The type and configuration of software on a box determines if it's a server, not the hardware.

Most builds of Vista (if not all) contain Internet Information Services, Microsoft's web server. You can get a Vista machine up and running as a web server in a few minutes with IIS.

Even giant enterprise systems use IIS (under Windows Server). It's very scalable and quite configurable.

 

[Shran]

I am running a Windows Server 2003 box as my web server. I was going to use IIS, but decided on a WAMP (Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP) install instead. Works really well and is 100% more stable and secure than IIS, and was surprisingly easy to configure.

 

[Evan]

Works really well and is 100% more stable and secure than IIS

How so?

Windows-IIS-Sql Server-ASP.NET is used by many fortune 500 and financial companies, whose systems require the utmost security and availability.

 

[MAKG]

Yes you CAN, but you shouldn't.

Opening a web server (and ESPECIALLY an FTP server) opens you up to a plethora of vulnerabilities that you wouldn't have had with a desktop and (hardware!) firewall. You need to be aware of what you're getting into.

Commercial sites separate externally visible web and FTP and mail servers into separate networks from their desktops. At work, we have several different networks (public, visiting scientist, operational, data pipelining, development), each separated from each other. For a reason. We don't have the nasa.gov domain, so we aren't the obvious target some other folks here are, but having a virus go through the building would be a disaster.

It doesn't take much power to make a web server. You'll be limited by your network, not the computer itself. So, pick up the headless motherboard and disk your neighbor is throwing away and use that.

And depending on Microsoft for security is a fool's errand. Do NOT depend on that POS "software" firewall, when you can buy one in hardware (that doesn't have access to your OS!) for $20.

 

[Evan]

Yes you CAN, but you shouldn't.

Opening a web server (and ESPECIALLY an FTP server) opens you up to a plethora of vulnerabilities that you wouldn't have had with a desktop and (hardware!) firewall. You need to be aware of what you're getting into.

Mike, I have run a web server on my desktop for a number of years with no issues. With the logging I run, I have witnessed many attempted attacks.

There are a few basic security steps that should be taken when running a personnal web server. The first is to firewall yourself by sitting behind a router that forwards only port 80 to your desktop on a private subnet. Also, keep your OS up to date with all security patches.

 

[Jspafford]

Yea, I had to port forward my router to my newly setup static IP address of my PC on my LAN.

This was just experimental. I don't think I am going to dump my provider... I have people using e-mail accounts and a live forum. I don't know enough about IIS7 to risk losing all that info trying to run it from my desktop.