Learning servers.

[wacrider]

Question for you server aficionado's. I've a P3 computer with 256 megs of ram and a 20GB hard drive that I'd like to turn into a server. I'm looking to 1. learn more about server systems and maintenance and 2. serve up my own internet site. I'm willing to upgrade the HD if necessary. Recently I setup my iMac (os 10.2. as a temporary internet file server using a dynamic address updater; It's easy to do but doesn't really teach you much per se'. I disabled it due to glitches I'm experiencing in my OS and browser now even tho I have a firewall on.

So, what is the book to read, internet site to peruse and the Linux incarnation to use as a first time learner. I downloaded a copy of xubuntu 6.06.1 that I've thought about installing on the machine but haven't yet. TFTH Wayne

[GNU-Fan]

I have no book recommendation for you, but I can tell how I think you can get your toes wet before you bring your first server online.

The single most important thing every server admin should keep always in mind is that everything outside beyond your firewalled home network is enemy territory, i.e. a hostile environment.

You will find your server under permanent attack from script kiddies all over the world who'd love to gain access to one more system.

I travel around in dedicated server forums and read a lot of desperate users' postings which say something like "My server got hacked ...".
This can be very instructional because you can learn from the mistake others made and over time you get more aware of potential attack vectors.

Oh, and also watch the logfiles and traffic of your machine in a frequently manner.

[FireArrow]

If you are prepared to spend some time on your server I'd recommend Gentoo or Arch Linux. These two dists are quite similar, and can be very customized depending on wants and needs.
One major difference though is that in Gentoo you will compile everything, so installing things takes a bit longer then on other dists.

What you likely need is a web-server (apache) with added support for php and maybe MySQL.
Remember though that as GNU-Fan said, the internet is a hostile place. Be very restrictive and careful. I'd recommend you don't put anything critical on the server until it have been thoroughly tested.
Make sure you use good passwords and somewhat strange usernames ( i.e. john isn't a very good username).

Remember: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't after you

[SagaciousKJB]

The first thing you're going to want to do is familiarize yourself with the command line. It's possible to run servers with a GUI environment, but there won't always be front-ends for servers, and you'll often be better off without wasting resources on the GUI environment itself.

I think the distribution to choose doesn't really matter a terrible amount, but the main thing you'll want to do is find something that tries to create a nice server environment and install the most common servers you'll use, right off the bat. It's a lot easier that way to learn and to get it up off the ground if you're new.

I have no problem with really customizable distributions like Slackware or Gentoo, but the first Linux server I setup, I basically hacked out a lot of components I didn't need rather than spend a lot of time setting up the "bare bones" for the ones I did need. It might mean little to you now, but for example, if you need to enable an option in the kernel to run a particular server, then using Gentoo or Slackware might come back on you, because you'll likely need to compile a new kernel if you tried the "bare bones" approach.


Anyway, aside from what kind of system you should use, and how you should use it ( which is all a matter of opinion anyway ), the last thing you should probably look up is "LAMP", or Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. There are many, many guides on setting up "LAMP" servers with various distributions, with various methods, and then of course there are a lot of alternatives you can find to LAMP just by searching of it. In any case, it's pretty much the starting point for a web server, in my opinion.

[Freston]

If you are just gonna run a webserver from your older computer, I recommend the unpronounceable thttpd. It's a lightweight webserver, that doesn't have all the features of the heavyweight Apache. But that makes it easier to set up and lighter to run.