Ye' old general discussion board. Basically, for everything that isn't covered elsewhere. Come here to shoot the breeze, shoot your mouth off, or whatever suits your fancy. This forum is not for asking programming related questions.
I know that setting up your own server is pretty easy to do these days.... get a phat computer, install apache, install mysql, and you're halfway there. I've got my own PHP server setup on my humble 400mhz PC for personal use.
However I'm not to sure about sorting out the 'node' part of things where your computer (server) has a dedicated (fixed) IP so that the outside world can access it.
Does anyone know of any good and clear (ie plain english) tutorials?
My home development server is accessible from the Internet.
It has a dynamic IP address, though, so whenever my IP changes (once, every 5 or 6 months) I have to update my name servers (I use PowerDNS as a DNS server), httpd.conf, etc. and let things propagate again.
A Node is basically a fixed IP address for your server. If you connect to the web using a service like BT, AOL, Freeserve etc they tend to give you a different IP address each time you connect...... not good for servers.
With a Node your IP is the same whenever you connect to the web. The best connection for a server is a high speed one, broadband for example, that allows your computer to be online 24/7........ but even having this you will need to disconnect and reconnect at some point, which is where the fixed IP (or Node) comes in useful.
This is all a matter of your ISP... the ISP where my webserver is situated (my brother's house) gives all their customers static IP's. so there is no problem there. however if you want to have a domain-name connected to the IP and do not want to pay, you should set up your own dns-server aswell, and hopefully you have some friend who also has a dns-server, thus allowing for people to connect to the domainname.
if you have a dynamic ip you can still have a server (having the bandwidth that is) and use a program like DirectUpdate for keeping your DynDNS alias up to date with your current ip. I use this for my home server and it works really good eventhough my firewall is the unix-server and I run the DirectUpdate from the PC... its just a background process... works really good.
This ISP http://www.charitydays.com provides static IPs for the business plans at least. As mentioned above, it varies from ISP to ISP - dynamic IPs do seem to be more common though.
Your ISP needs to give you a static IP with your connect. Mine gives me two dynamic addresses. Which is okay since I don't have a full time server running. But if you want to do one 24/7 try asking for an upgrade to a static ip. It's usually not given by default and costs a bit more. But it's worth it to host your own site.
If you don't want to upgrade or can't get a static address for whatever reason try DynDNS.org's Dynamic DNS service.
If you get a P4 2.4Ghz box w/ a nice ammount of ram and 60-80 GB of space you got yourself a pretty good setup for running a quick loading site (even a hosting service!).
Don't forget to block every port but 80 (leave out whatever you need, eg. i leave 27960 open for quake 3 arena).
I forgot to do that once and my machince was hacked while it was running one night.
It did? Because I once had about 8 concurrent users (and not just sitting there doing nothing), and I didn't notice much (if any) when switching memory banks from 1 to 2GB.