Hey,

Ive been drifting in and out of the linux world for some time, but now have a laptop and a computer, and now have windows on my laptop and linux on my old computer (blah de blah, you get the jist).

Basically i used to host small scale websites on my xp using zoneedit on my domains, but my main thought behind running linux once again was to use it as a webserver and not having to use zonedit but host domains directly from my linux install,
I have plans to install a control panel and host a few domains, ive been in webhosting biz for years but not familiar of setting up servers from scratch.

What i need to know is how to get my domain hosted onto my linux suse box, i'm as far as changing my ns to ns1.mydomain.tld and ns2.mydomain.tld, but don't have the slightest idea on how to configure my linux install to host my domain, i have apache, php, perl and all the rest running already (thanks to the ease of lampp http://www.apachefriends.org) now i just need to sort the domain.

Help will be greatly recieved,
Thanks,
James.

James,

First the prelim. Your ISP allows you to host web sites from your location, and you have a static IP address to do this. If the previous statement is incorrect in any-way, contact your ISP first.

Second, you mention that you have Apache installed already (great). However, with that being the case, there's not a question left. Installing Apache is what is needed on your Linux box to host a web site (though, not necessarily a whole domain -- those are different).

If you are asking about hosting a whole domain, then you also need BIND (named), configured to deal with DNS requests (so that you have something to point ns1.mydomain.tld to. Of course, this is only one system, and you'll probably need a backup DNS server as well.

If you don't need to host the DNS, and only the web site... then you'll instead need to make sure your site if functioning first. You can test a web site without DNS by adding it's name directly into your "etc hosts" file. (on Linux this is /etc/hosts - the same is in windows under \WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts ). Then enter in the expected host name into your browser, and see if it works.

Once you have the site, and you know its functioning, then you need to set the DNS (yours or your providers) to make sure that name points to your Linux server, wait 4 to 12 hours for the DNS to propagate, and you should be online.