Creating a linux server

[wile]

I want to create a Linux server with my dsl provider (Sbc) (origanally was ameriatech) (preferabally with Sol (sever optimized linux), could anyone tell me how to do this?

[wile]

And i do know you have to get a domain name.... (any recomendations?)

[wile]

How do i find out whta kind of ip i have, dynamic, or static?

[KillerShots]

Is SOL a distribution?

As far as finding what kind of IP you have, if you don't know right now it's dynamic. You pay extra for static.

What kind of services do you intend to run? Game server? Web server? FTP server? VNC server? VPN server? Personally, I use Gentoo to do all of the above... but that's turning out to be an undesirable option (their "stable" stuff doesn't compile!!!). Failing that, I suppose I'd go to Slackware...

[jjk2000]

>>Is SOL a Distribution?

Yes. It can be found here: http://www.linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=53

[ammoQ]

Why SOL? I know "server optimized" sounds impressive, but in the end, most linux distros are more-or-less "server optimized"; and you will probably find much more people who can help you with setting up RedHat (Fedora), SuSE, Debian or Mandrake. BTW, SOL is made by this people: http://www.antitachyon.at/

[Kethinov]

Originally Posted by wile

How do i find out whta kind of ip i have, dynamic, or static?

Call your ISP and ask them.

As for this "Sol" distro of your's. No clue.

But setting up a webserver, samba server, nfs server, mysql server, etc is ridiculously easy in Debian.

Go to debian.org and download the latest 100mb net install CD. Then after you install your system it asks you things like what your domain name is and so forth. If you **** up the configs you can always go back and change it.

Installing a web server is as simple as apt-get install apache. Installing enabling ssh server is as simple as apt-get install ssh. Very easy.

[FLaRe85]

Originally Posted by wile

And i do know you have to get a domain name.... (any recomendations?)

You don't HAVE to get a domain name. You could always connect via the IP address, but it's probably dynamic so it will always be changing. Your best bet is to purchase a domain and then host the DNS at ZoneEdit and use some kind of dynamic DNS updater so the domain is always pointing to your current IP address.

[wile]

Ok, everyone is saying SOL isnt any diffrent, so what about slackware, or any other distro for that matter?

[wile]

Originally Posted by KillerShots

Is SOL a distribution?

As far as finding what kind of IP you have, if you don't know right now it's dynamic. You pay extra for static.

What kind of services do you intend to run? Game server? Web server? FTP server? VNC server? VPN server? Personally, I use Gentoo to do all of the above... but that's turning out to be an undesirable option (their "stable" stuff doesn't compile!!!). Failing that, I suppose I'd go to Slackware...

i want to setup a simple webserver.

[Kethinov]

There are only two things that truly different across Linux distros. Package management and the installer.

Distros like Debian, Gentoo, and Redhat have package managers. They are apt-get, portage/emerge, and rpm respectively. Distros like Slackware (to my knowledge) lack package management. To install software you have to compile it, and that's a pain in the ass.

[Kethinov]

Originally Posted by wile

i want to setup a simple webserver.

*Car salesmen* It doesn't get any easier than Debian. I've done it in Gentoo, Fedora, and Debian and I'd say Debian was easiest by far.

[KillerShots]

It really depends on your experience... Slackware does indeed want you to find and compile everything, which may not work too well if you're not good at interpreting why things fail. Debian's another option that doesn't require you to compile things, but a lot of packages get horrendously out of date there... BUT it works on even very low end machines very well (I installed debian w/ web server in under 1/2 hour with software RAID support on a little P-200 w/ 48M RAM). If you want to, you can get more up to date software by simply downloading and installing in the places where it's just too far out of date.

On the other hand, distros like Mandrake and RedHat (or Fedora) do the same job and tend to stay more up-to-date. They also have a graphical package management system (Mandrake uses rpmdrake, RedHat and Fedora have their own (I saw it, but can't recall what it was called)). The downside here is that these distros take a much beefier machine to install. Both Mandrake and RedHat took 3 days to install the base system on my poor old P-200... and that was with a text-based installer! In fact, it took approximately 3-4 seconds to switch from one menu option to another!

Of course, I wouldn't even think of installing Gentoo on such a low-end machine... but Gentoo has multiple levels of installation. You can compile EVERYTHING from scratch with optimization flags for your specific CPU, architecture, etc. This speeds many things up, but can take a very long time to install. You can also simply install the binaries for the options you want. I can't say how well that works, because I've never used it. Both my machines are compiled from scratch. Like I said earlier, however, they update frequently on the "stable" side and break things a lot... so it may not be the best option for a web server.

What sort of machine do you intend to do this with? That's probably the most important question on choosing the distro after you've decided what it needs to do.

[Kethinov]

Change your sources.list in debian to unstable (deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/ unstable main should be the line) and you get the most up to date software. When you do that, Debian's no more out of date than most other distros. If you want ot be truly up to date, you use Slack and compile everything.

BTW, Debian does have graphical package managers. In fact, it was the first one to have one. It's called Synaptic. And it comes with either xfree, gnome, or kde. Not sure which. (Maybe both GNOME and KDE.)

But package management in Deb is so easy from the terminal I never bother with it.

[wile]

Well, i installed Redhat, now what?

[Kethinov]

When I was using Fedora (an offshoot of redhat), you could install stuff by using the "yum" package manager. yum install apache, or something like that. But I've never used regular Redhat, so I can't be much more helpful than that.

It should be noted that if you're making a server, GUI apps like XFree, KDE, GNOME, etc will reduce it's performance. Unless you plan on this machine doubling as your PC AND your server, you shouldn't run X while servin'.

[Takmadeus]

Welll I might suggest you to get apache (perhaps it is already installed in your system, and it is damn good ) and get webmin (web based system administration service) that way you can shut down unneeded services (X, alsa, etc) and just administrate your system remotely

[KillerShots]

I don't know off-hand what Red-Hat's package managemend system is called, but if you have already installed X, before you remove it look for a package management program and install apache. That's it, all you need for a webserver. Then uninstall X .

Actually, I'm still toying with keeping a VNC server running on my server so I have access to all my Linux stuff even when I'm running Windows. Works great over LAN, and pretty well over the internet. However, you'll have to keep X on to use it. Then again, my needs are very different than what most people care for anyways, so this probably won't interest you

[Takmadeus]

Hey, I am interested, may you tell what are the uses for your VNC server?

[KillerShots]

I used the VNC server so I could access the X desktop on a machine without a keyboard, monitor, or mouse. On the LAN, it works almost like you're using that machine's linux on your local machine (though I wouldn't try and run movies or games through it!). You don't need a graphics driver at all to get it running because it displays through the network instead of on a monitor.

Basically, anything I could do locally to manage the machine, I could also do through VNC. To set it up, install "tight-vnc" package. Once installed, type "vncserver :0" into a console and it will be up and running on that machine under the user account you started it in. You can also have multiple sessions running at the same time through different ports (instead of :0, use :1, :2, :3, etc. - these use tcp ports 5900, 5901, 5902, 5903, respectively). You can also change the geometry and color depth with -geometry and -depth (check the man page ).

On your desktop, install a vncviewer client. They have these for pretty much every OS, so using Windows to access your server is no problem. When it asks you what to connect to, type in the IP followed by :0, :1, :2, or :3 (whatever you chose earlier) without a space between the IP and the :.

Bear in mind, whenever you use this you also have X along with KDE, gnome, icewm or whatever it is that you're running in memory to share with your web server.