the whole she-bang of setting up your own webhosting
well old craig newmark and his buddies decided to axe us, ban us and on top of that decided to call our hosting service, whine a bit and have us shut down. I can't say enough good things about datapipe...nice folks but they flipped the switch on us when craig blasted in their ear...we only had ONE person complain and that's because they were involved in a war with an autoresponder trying to get 'unsubscribed'. have you ever seen this little comedy where a person keeps telling an autoresponder to stop sending them mail? ...jeeez... but ok, he shut us down and 20 sites went offline overnight... and we are still down until I figure out how to use apache. almost there I think thanks to choon and a few others...
Side-Q for the readers... is finding daycare centers at craigslist and sending them UNINVITED OFFERS for free computers considered spam? I mean we really mean FREE as in charity for kids.
Well he thought so and went ballistic. Is sending single mothers, escorts and strippers, gang bangers and pot-smoking teens invitations to learn computers so they can get legit jobs really spam?
Well most of them liked the invitation but uh, well, craig newmark isn't getting any xmas presents from me for awhile... we had several sites banned from posting ads at his site and shutting us down was painful but learning new skills often feels that way...
So what the heck... i registered craigsworld.org and we are going to blow right past him in terms of global coverage and actually delivering on the nonprofit promise... I have to wonder why a guy with such exposure would wear a fur coat for a camera but that's another issue...
Anyway, so off we go to learn apache and I must say it does come up pretty easily and open src is so kewl I could drool but the whole virtual hosting thing was a bit complicated.
choon's solution was probably cleaner than dynamic aliasing but since we were/are using a domain forwarding service so we can have multiple email addys and had controlled everything with one domain (with seperate folders/directories for other domains), we had everything forwarding to various areas under a single domain. now we need to break those up (rewriting all the links for 1000+ pages is going to be a joy), but it's doable.
Regarding apache and our 'single ip address' limitation, it would be nice if you could log into the forwarding service and set up a url to forward to and pass a parameter in the href such as http://123.12.123.12/adomain.com and http://123.12.123.12/bdomain.com and have them resolve to the correct folders on your system using the MASS ALIASING techniques I described in other threads so all users had a consistent set of permissions. But as described before, you only get %0, 1, 2, 3 and 4 and everything after that slash was ignored so %5 (adomain) and %6 (com in example above) were not available to create dynamic aliasing for the vhost.
so we fixed that by having to go register a NEW site bigdrivehosting.com and once that resolves (waiting), we can use forwarding links such as adomain.bigdrivehosting.com and bdomain.bigdrivehosting.com and have seperate folders for each domain... with only one or two virtualhost blocks in the conf file. i was not looking forward to maintaining 10 or 50 of those in that file so while i think the subdomain appearance is cheesy, for now we will give it a try...
so step 1 in going live is to choose between apache and iis and I have to say that we were attacked regularly during the first 48 hours of operation and they were all attempts to undermine the iis buffer overflow problem so I was pretty glad we had chosen apache.
and step 2 is to edit the httpd.conf file and get your vhost blocks working (waiting...) and also...
step 3 is to name your servers which prompted this little (growing) post...
Q for the readers... we all think a host should be named www.mynewdomain.com but in fact we see a lot of ns1.mynewdomain.com when it comes to hosting multiple sites from a single box... what is the 'technically correct' way to set up and coordinate the forwarding at a service like mydomain.com with your new box or...
...once you get your own email server working do you just scrap the mydomain.com forwarding service and set up a single dns hit to your ip address (in this case bigdrivehosting.com) and call the server (in the conf file) ns1.bigdrivehosting.com and also...
Q-dont cha need TWO name servers? And also...
Q-the MX records and all that stuff... all that will have to be set up if we scrap the forwarding, right?
So, step 1-set up apache, actually consists of many steps to get it all coordinated and that's before you even think about setting up the SMTP server...choon mentioned getting the DNS straight but has anyone seen a nice clean document on each of these steps, from point A to Z and if so...
STEP 2 - the mail server... is james the latest and greatest and most promising tool? any third-party documentation out there for setting that up would be a boon to humanity.
STEP 3 - setting up any services/software you want to offer people who are hosted at your site (as well as yourself). The good news is I can do Perl blindfolded and am HOPING the cgi aliases I set up will work once we get apache fully functional, but PhP, SQL and all the rest need to come online as well.
So, at Kids Computer Kamp (the free labs we run for kids) we teach them to take a motherboard, cards, drives and stuff them into a box, run bios, fdisk and format and get a C prompt and do it in under 20 minutes to pass. Fastest time was 9:47 by a 13 year old. The pace and speed of the labs is a blast....
The question from this old teacher becomes, how fast can a webmaster take a set of domains and a dumb-box and turn it into a server with full apache and mail and perl and ftp? Any guess as to the minimum length of time required and if you are so bold as to say less than 2 weeks (my present plight), might I suggest that you have the capabilities of writing a little white paper on this and dragging the rest of us up to your speed...
...just a few questions and answers for the group...
...now I gotta go read about hosting behind a router... nice site this is...
