Hello friends,

I wanted to start a website on fedora 12.But dont know how to proceed.Website is to be build for college.I know how to setup localhost on fedora 12.But there are certain points like "webspace"
and "domain name".Can I have my own DNS server?...then how to set it up..? Basically can anybody help me out on how build a website on fedora 12...? What to purschase...?What can be done without purchase..?Thanks in advance...

Apache is the web server program. You need to determine your your IP (The first thing the modem attaches to will have your ip. If it is a router, you look in the router config. If it is a PC, you run /sbin/ifconfig. Apache has a directory in which to put the public files. Then, you go to a dynamic DNS site, get domain, and set it to your IP. Forward TCP ports 80:81 incoming, or open them using the firewall program. That's about it. And yes, you can run your own DNS server, or you can choose a DNS server that already exists.

1 members found this post helpful.

Basically, what you are talking about is a LAMP web server (Linux Apache MySQL PHP). You can google for some good tutorials. All of those packages are freely available and can be installed with System -> Add/Remove programs in Fedora. To start Apache (the daemon is called httpd) you can type the following in a terminal:

Then, just open up a web browser and go to http://localhost/ The other packages are PHP for server-side scripting and MySQL for a database. These aren't necessary, but these days are pretty standard and not much trouble to set up.

Mostly, you will be editing the file /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf which isn't nearly as hard as it looks. The entry DocumentRoot tells Apache where the root directory is. You can drop your html files there or point it to another directory. Remember to restart Apache after editing that file.

As for DNS, if you are going to be a part of your college network, you could just as your network administrator to set the entries for you in the network's DNS server.

If you are running your own network, you may need to install BIND (it's daemon is named) and optionally dhcpd. Both of those are also in Add/Remove programs. However, if you only want a really simple network, you could just forget about those programs and just edit each computer's /etc/hosts file.

It's not very hard, and is totally free. Later, you can learn about Linux networking, routing and firewalls with iptables, etc.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hey,

First of all thanks to both of you.
Hi! Kinosounous.
I have done http://locslhost/ .I dont have static ip at home. I have also put some HTML pages into /var/www/html.The page gets displayed in mhy browser once I type http://localhost/ in the browser.Is there any way I can make this localhost accessible to others.
Actually project is to start a website for computer science branch that has features such as repository that maintains projects of students,forum,blogging ,etc.Can anyone eleborate more on DNS setup?I new to this Linux world ,is it that localhost can be made accessible to others if i have a live ip..?

You can run your own nameserver and in many cases if you are behind a NAT router you will, so you can access internal private resources by name instead of IP address. However, I believe you have to register a nameserver that is on the Internet. That said, there are alternatives. Use a service like dyndns.org, no-ip.info or other DNS service that allows you to take a registered domain name, that you have registered and let it redirect to an IP address. DynDNS is a dynamic DNS service which will let you run a client on your computer and update their nameservers as your IP address changes. As far as making your content accessible to the outside world. First if you are behind a NAT firewall/router the router need to have port forwarding or IP mapping and you need to have access to the configuration. If you are behinf a NAT firewall you should set your computer IP to static in order to map the port forwarding or IP mapping to your machine. If you cannot edit the NAT firewall configuration only those behind the firewall would be able to access the site hosted on your computer. Second in either case you need to make sure that your iptables rules on your machine are not blocking the ports you want open, in this case probably 80 HTTP and 443 HTTPS If your PC blocks those ports no one can access the content. Hope this helps.

The first step is to set your IP address. "localhost" is set in your /etc/hosts file and is a special IP address (127.0.0.1 called the loop back address) that just points your computer back to itself, so that won't work. In theory, you could just choose almost any IP address for yourself, but in practice, the address will have to be one inside of the same network as the other computers. If you are already on the network, that address is probably set for you. Assuming that you are connected over an internet cable, you could type "ifconfig eth0" The output should contain a line that says "inet addr 192.168.1.102" or something like that. That number is your IP address. ifconfig is also the command that can set your IP address too if you know what it should be: ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.102

Once you have your IP address, another computer on that network could point their browser at that address (i.e. http://192.168.1.102/) However, there could be some complications. The first is that your computer's firewall (iptables) could be set to block incoming requests for http. Also your IP address may be dynamic. If that is the case, it will be changed each time you reconnect to the network.

A DNS is a Domain Name Server that takes a name like www.linuxquestions.org and converts it into an IP address like 75.126.162.205 You should worry about that after everything works fine with the IP address. As the previous post mentioned, you will need to use NAT if you need to be reached from outside of your college. Most likely, though, all of the client computers (those that are browsing your site) will be on the same subnet.

This is where I would recommend looking up a good tutorial on networking in general. There are a lot of things that can go wrong. They are often simple to fix if you know what you're doing, though.