Well, everything seems to be going exceptionally smoothly so far. Time for bed now, but next time I will be installing MySQL. Then once that is set up I should in theory have a test environment to test database driven websites such as Drupal and WordPress. And this will help me on my journey to become a web designer, or as decided today, a web solutions manager. Personally, I feel that hacker is still more apt for my skills. But they are getting there. Although I am not entirely sure what I have learnt this evening, other than with Ubuntu / Linux it is very easy to install Apache and PHP.
Hopefully I will have time to install MySQL tomorrow night. For now, I want to quickly check that I can view a simple static html page on my Apache web server……
Excellent, it worked. In the terminal I typed
sudo gedit /var/www/index.html
which opened the text editor. I copied the source code of the index page of my Tranquillizer website, saved, then pointed my browser at http://localhost/ and the page is there, in all its glory. Just to be sure (I am like that) I created a page called page.htm and then pointed my browser to http://localhost/page.htm and guess what? It worked. One question I have (which you are free to answer, as I am going to bed now, and will probably forget to look it up) is why when pointing the browser to an non-existent page, the message shown is:
Not Found
The requested URL /page2 was not found on this server.
Apache/2.2.3 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.1 Server at localhost Port 80
With no mention of 404. What is 404? When does it get shown?
I guess that the next steps in my wen hosting and Linux server administration journey would be to “open up” port 80, and somehow point a website to it. Need to sort out DNS, name servers, IP addresses etc. Do I have a static IP address? What else do I need? More to come…. more questions, and hopefully soon more answers.
Keep reading, and soon you too will know exactly how to host your own websites. Well, that assumes that I manage to do so without too many problems!
