Home web server

[Ken Burtch]

On Mon, 10 May 2010, Daniel Armstrong wrote:

> Hi all... Anybody hosting their own web server from home?

Yes, though it looks like it didn't come back up after yesterday's power 
failure.

> As a learning exercise I am considering setting up a server with this
> configuration:
>
> Hardware: Asus EeePC 900HA (built-in UPS! :-)
> OS: Debian Squeeze
> Web Server: nginx serving up some static web pages created in ikiwiki
> Router: Linksys WRT54GL running Tomato 1.27
> ISP: Teksavvy (whose Terms of Use allow running home servers)
>
> A few questions:
>
> 1/ Good registrar? I saw the earlier thread about registering *.ca
> domains... any reason to pay a bit more at domainsatcost.ca vs - for
> example - godaddy to register a *.com domain?

I'm using easydns.com as my registrar.  They seem decent.  YMMV.

> 2/ For a home server... has experience proved it pays to put the
> server on a separate subnet vs basic forwarding of port 80? I found a
> good tutorial for creating another VLAN in Tomato:
>
> http://www.seiichiro0185.org/doku.php/blog:creating_a_seperate_guest_network_with_tomato

Always put your webserver on a separate subnet and configure your router 
so that the web server is a DMZ.  This way, you can connect to the web 
server from your other compuers, but you can't connect in the other 
direction.  This prevents someone hacking your web server from gaining 
access to your other computers.

I don't have Tomato experience...I'm running another P3 Lnux computer as 
my firewall/router.  Perhaps someone else can comment.

Ken B.

> Any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated.
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Ken O. Burtch                                       Phone/Fax: 905-562-0848
   "Linux Shell Scripting with Bash"                  Email: ken-8VyUGRzHQ8IsA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
                                     Blog: http://www.pegasoft.ca/coder.html
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--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists