I am a Linux newbie, and am looking to setup a webserver as a project.

I am planning to use Red Hat 9 as most Linux webservers on the net seem to use this OS but may consider using Fedora Core 2.

I plan to use Apache,MySQL,PHP and perhaps Perl and wish to setup a clone of the type of web servers you get as standard on the net but using something else as cpanel because of the licesning cost so will need an alternative to this.

I will use my DSL connection to host it on, and am aware of speed problems and ISP permisions on this but will use something like www.no-ip.com tosort out the DNS.

Other things I want will be sendmail and awstats etc.

After I have learnt a bit about It I will go for a dedicated server for my site, but that seems a bit daunting at the moment

Any tips/ suggestions on setup and advise on security will be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

There are plenty of tutorials and howtos for setting up your webserver online, so I won't go into detail but just mention a few things to keep in mind.

- Learn how to admin your server for real, so ditch control panel-like applications. If you need remote access to be able to admin your server then ssh will do just fine.

- RedHat 9 is not even updated by Redhat themselves anymore, IIRC. Go with a more recent distribution since you will want the security fixes and it will save you a lot of hazzle. Fedora Core 2 should do well, as should just about any other distribution. Most distributions will set up Apache, Perl, PHP and Python automatically for you if you select them all at install time. You will most likely just edit your Apache configuration file to set up things like hostname.

- I use dyndns.org and the excellent ddclient (for automatically updating the records) for keeping track of my computer IP's.

- Sendmail is probably the most difficult SMTP server to deal with. I prefer Postfix or Exim, you might want to check them out instead. Just remember to not allow any other computer than localhost to send mail through it until you know what you're doing. Chances are you're setting up a spam relay without knowing it if you're careless.

- Awstats is a breeze to install and works very well for me.

- You may also want to install logwatch. Logwatch will parse your files and send you a mail daily (or weekly) with information about logins and login attempts as well as other useful information gathered from the logs.


Håkan