First server suggestions
 

hey all,

Booted up my server for the first time today, remotely controlled via putty ssh on my windows laptop! very cool, but theres absolutely nothing on it! (apart from ubuntu linux obviously)

I do not have a static IP, so servers such as apache, pop3 or even IRC network clients arnt much use to me. Any suggestions what i could run on this server.. as you can tell i'm a complete newbie and would just like to get something booted up to play with and learn from.

Would be helpful if suggestive packages can be obtained through apt-get commands.

regards,

jak

you could use a dynamic domain server (for free: http://www.dyndns.com) and then host whatever you wanted despite the variable IP address (its what I do. you can view my Why I Quit Windows page @ http://verdenet.gotdns.org -- if its up [usually is]). Mail servers are a pain, but you could host a quick and dirty FTP server and access your files remotely.

If you do use a service like dydns or http://www.zoneedit.com make sure you use ddclient. It is far superior to others i've tried. http://ddclient.sourceforge.net/

I think the coolest thing you could set up is apache. It's not very hard to do.

I have Ubuntu which I run as a web server. As you've noticed Ubuntu installs more of a desktop environment by default but it's easy to add the web server packages.

If you are on a dynamic IP address then you could use dynamic dns. As well as the others already mentioned the one I use is http://freedns.afraid.org/. There is a page that you can download using wget which can be easily added to cron.

The packages I installed (using apt-get install <packagename>) are:

• mysql-server (database)
• Apache 2
• openssh-server (for remote access - sounds like you've already got that installed)
• libapache2-modperl2
• libapache2-mod-php5
• libapache2-mod-python (optional)
• php5-mysql
• php5-dev
• php5-curl
• awstats (for apache server stats)
• phpmyadmin (to adminster mysql db with)

Which gives a good selection of web server related packages.