Well, it seemed extremely easy in the end to set up a home server. I feel that I have not advanced my understanding of Linux a great deal, but I did manage to get a server up an running, of sorts. At least, I think that it is up and running OK.
I accessed my router controls, on IP address http://192.168.0.1, and in the Firewall section I opened up port 80 for HTTP and port 22 for SSH. I still could not access my server using PuTTy, which confused me. I thought that I had to change some configuration settings in Apache, and spent almost a day reading and searching the internet for tutorials. In the end, sort of out of desperation, I typed “sshd” (I saw a thread in a forum somewhere referring to running sshd to allow ssh access) into the Linux terminal, and received this reply:
The program ‘sshd’ is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
apt-get install openssh-server
So that is what I did, I typed “apt-get install openssh-server” and was greeted with this output:
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Suggested packages:
rssh molly-guard
The following NEW packages will be installed
openssh-server
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 236kB of archives.
After unpacking 610kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get: 1 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com feisty/main openssh-server 1:4.3p2-8ubuntu1 [236kB]
Fetched 236kB in 0s (614kB/s)
Preconfiguring packages …
Selecting previously deselected package openssh-server.
(Reading database … 105829 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking openssh-server (from …/openssh-server_1%3a4.3p2-8ubuntu1_i386.deb) …
Setting up openssh-server (4.3p2-8ubuntu1) …
Creating SSH2 RSA key; this may take some time …
Creating SSH2 DSA key; this may take some time …
* Restarting OpenBSD Secure Shell server…
And that was that. I then went to PuTTy on my XP machine and tried to access my IP again, and was asked if I trusted the host, and if so, I could save the details (or something), I said “OK” and had access to my Linux server.
So I guess that everything is working OK. I was unsure if I was viewing my wesite on the server over the internet, or whether I could only see it because it is all on the same home network, but I am now pretty sure everything is working fine. I want to get someone to check it out though, just to be sure. So next I need to look into security, and then set up nameservers so that I can actually host a domain rather than an IP address.
More in this as it happens!
