If you’ve been wishing that you could install a web server on your Ubuntu PC, you will be pleased to find out that you can install one very easily. All you will need is an Internet connection, and a bit of time. I hope this guide is helpful.
Here’s how to install: Open Synaptic Package Manager. Choose Edit > Mark Packages by Task. Scroll down and check the box beside “LAMP Server.” This will mark apache2, PHP, and MySQL for installation. Apply the changes. You will be prompted for some configuration information. That’s it! Punch http://localhost into your browser’s address box to test your installation.
Now I suppose you want to add some files. The server’s root directory is /var/www. If you navigate there with your file browser you will see the files, and even be able to open them with gedit, but you will not be able to edit them. This is because the directory is owned by root. There are multiple ways to work with this. You can run Nautilus from a terminal (sudo nautilus /var/www), or even create a launcher on your desktop (for this command: gksudo nautilus /var/www). However, you will probably find it more convenient to change the permissions of the /var/www folder. To do this, run Nautilus as root (sudo nautilus), navigate to the /var folder and right-click on the www folder. Give yourself access under the permissions tab. Now you can create and delete files without running your file browser as root.
Feedback welcome!
Oh by the way, you can access the server from another computer on the network as well, provided that your firewall allows incoming traffic on port 80. Just enter http://your-ip, where your-ip is the ip address of the computer that hosts the server.
Before you plunk down serious cash on an enterprise virtualization solution, check out the free, open-source ProxMox VE. It is based on two mature open-source virtualization products, namely OpenVZ and KVM. I maintain two physical ProxMox VE servers running a total of eight virtual machine “guests”, including Ubuntu 8.04, Ubuntu 9.04, Windows 2003, and CentOS. So far, the expirience has been nothing but positive.
To download ProxMox VE, head over to the developers website at www.proxmox.com and find ProxMox VE on their product page. Or just go straight to pve.proxmox.com to get right into the good stuff.
There’s also a good review of ProxMox over at www.montanalinux.org.
After years of hosting my blog and other web sites on rented server space, I now have my very own web server. For the geeks out there who care to know, it is a Ubuntu 7.10 server running in a VMWare virtual machine, which is running on my Ubuntu 7.10 file server. Why run Ubuntu 7.10 virtualized below Ubuntu 7.10? The reason is simply because the of the time it takes to configure the web server and the associated software like apache, wordpress, mysql, egroupware, postgres, and others. By running this on a virtual machine, I can easy make a complete backup of the web server VM. Then, when server hardware fails, my web sites will be back online quickly, even before the server is repaired. If needed, I can even place the VM on one of my Windows or Ubuntu workstations temporarily.
I compress the virtual machine backups with 7-zip, an open source product with a much higher compression ratio than .ZIP products. This allows the virtual machine to be copied to a single CD, ready for quick restoration when trouble strikes.
Originally I planned to move my old blog posts to the new server. However, because I’m lazy and computer information gets out-of-date quickly anyway, I’ve decided to start over Therefore, this is post #1.
