Hi

I'd like to say that I am rather a beginner with hosting, so if there is one way, please dont beat me up for not knowing...

I have been with linux for quite some time, and I mostly found my fun at setting up Debian on weird and mostly specalized Japanese laptops, therefore making hardware work under linux is not a big problem, but rather the apps and configs I should use for webhosting is.

I not long ago acquired a semi-old IBM Netfinity 5500 M20 with Quad PIII 500 Xeons and 1,5GB memory. It has two RAID 5 sets of drives, one is 18GB (made of 3x9GB) and one is 72GB (made of 3x36GB) all SCSI.

I will place the server at a Co-location facility soon, and I would like to start serving a few wesites, and we will see how it goes on from there.

My questions are as follows:

How should I set the machine up for webhosting?
What should I use for firewall?
How can I easily set up new sites?
Is there any plugins for Webmin, etc for quick setup of new sites?
What should I use for monitoring services, and other things?

I am currently signed up for webhosting on a server in the States, and there is a very nice Cpanel for me to sign into, where I can make all required changes, I have my locked-in shell with SSH login, and I can set my own MySQL needs, etc. Its really wonderfull, like having a virtual server. I would like to get a similar of course simpler/cheaper solution for my clients at the beginning.

If anyone could help, I would greatly appreciate it. The Server is running, it has Debian with a 2.6.9 custom built SMP-highmem-SCSI-RAID etc enabled kernel, all functional, ready to be configured.

Thanks

Ben

This may help;
http://www.comptechdoc.org/os/linux/manual4/index.html

Hi

Thanks, I am looking at it and I can learn some from there, thanks.

On top of that manual, would someone be able to share his/her experience of having a webhosting server, and what is necessary for it in general terms?

Thanks a lot,

Ben

If you want a simple way to manage the webhosting you may want to look at some ofhte available webhosting control panels. These Vary from Commercial to GPL and Free solutions. Some of the more popular ones are cPanel, Plesk (both commercial) here is a site with links to some of what is available.

http://www.web-hosting-top.com/web-h...control-panels


Also howtoforge has some nice articles on configuring a server to be a shared host.
http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_debian_sarge
http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_se...n_sarge_strato - (this one uses ISPConfig a BSD Licensed Hosting control Panel) http://www.ispconfig.org/


Just in case you run into an issue due to the RAID controllers on the server not being recognised by the Debian installer, there are alternate install images created by users to address those problems. Maybe you will get lucky and not need tham but just in case here's one such link.. not sure if the ips controller is supported by default or not..
http://wiki.osuosl.org/display/LNX/D...CommentId=7746
http://wiki.debian.org/LinuxRaidForAdmins

Enjoy !!

Hi

Hmm, dont know what to say, you pretty much said it all. THANKS!!. Great collection of sites.

As for the RAID controller, I guess I am pretty lucky and it worked out of the box with the Debian NetInstall 3.1 Sarge as long as I install it with the linux26 option, with 2.6 kernel.

I will try to follow these tutorials as much as possible, and let you know how I end up setting it up.

Thanks again, and have a good weekend,

Of course, as usual, if there is anything to add for a n00b who is setting up a Hosting server, please post away.

Cheers

Ben