Ultimately, I think it would be smarter to stick with a host ...
Smarter for whom? Smarter for ME? Smarter for CSCGAL? Smarter for Everyone?
While that statement might be true for some, don't make it a blanket statement for everyone. I know a lot of people that don't HAVE the extra $5 it would cost them every month. They have everything else except the cash flow, so why shouldn't they if they know what they're doing?
I for one am sure as hell not going to pay a hosting provider for something I can do on my own, especially when the content is mainly for me and my clients, considering it's mostly projects I'm working on. I already pay for 4 hosting accounts that are for business - I'm not about to pay for one that I use for fun/testing/projects/learning.
I think the best advice for someone contemplating hosting their own website would be to do their homework, investigate the possibilities, the costs, the hours involved in the maintenance, security, and the LEARNING involved with the whole project. If you want a shopping cart with SSL and certificates and other bells & whistles, then I'd recommend paying for a hosting provider. If you're curious to see how it's done and want to have fun with it, GO FOR IT! You won't learn anything about it until you actually get a server up and running. (Just make sure you read your ISP's TOS and understand the consequences …
Considering it's a used system with someone else's version/license of XP, and according to rellie1977 he wanted to format the drive anyway, it's HIGHLY ADVISABLE that the drive get reformatted. Plus, there's no worries of whether or not the system is infected with viruses, malware, etc. if a clean O/S is installed on a fresh partition.
If you want to repartition and format the hard drive, boot the system with a Windows 98 boot disk and type fdisk which will bring you to the screen you will need to define the partitions for your system. Then format and reinstall your O/S of choice. This will get rid of the dual boot issue, provided you wipe out all partitions with fdisk. If it's still a problem, try fdisk /mbr which rewrites the master boot record of the drive.
You can sign up for a free service @ http://freedns.afraid.org and have it take care of the reverse DNS for you, as long as you already have a domain registered. The instructions are on the site, and it's what I use for my personal site hosted on my personal server. No blah.dyndns.com or anything, just www.yourdomain.com They also provide a script that will automatically update your IP if it changes, so the domain will always resolve.
Read through there and see the horror stories some people are exeriencing, along with their new "policy" regarding your bank account and charges. They can actually "freeze" your account and steal money, and there's nothing you can do about it (without exhorbitant legal fees to get it rectified.)
I'm about to finalize a design from a company that does this for Fortune 500 companies that I found on eLance.com. $350 for a Corporate Identity package which includes the logo, letterhead, business cards, and a website template. If anyone's interested, I've got two companies that I'm doing work with now that are awesome for design work. Drop me a PM if you want more info.
Actually, if he's going to just be forwarding mail, a firewall/natd rule (portforwarding) might just be easier, if it's just a matter of routing the mail from one IP to another inside the network. I probably read the thread wrong - I've been up for going on 53 hours straight now, so I apologize if I went off on a tangent.
Yes, a simple qmail/postfix solution would work if he needed to forward the actual mail to another system internally...
Time to get some sleep now before I do something stupid in my zombie state... like rm -rf /* or cat /* > /dev/null or something similar...
DESCRIPTION Shutdown provides an automated shutdown procedure for super-users to nicely notify users when the system is shutting down, saving them from system administrators, hackers, and gurus, who would otherwise not bother with such niceties.
The following options are available:
-h The system is halted at the specified time.
-p The system is halted and the power is turned off (hardware sup- port required) at the specified time.
-r The system is rebooted at the specified time.
-k Kick everybody off. The -k option does not actually halt the system, but leaves the system multi-user with logins disabled (for all but super-user).
-o If one of the -h, -p or -r is specified, shutdown will execute halt(8) or reboot(8) instead of sending signal to init(8).
-n If the -o is specified, prevent the file system cache from being flushed by passing -n option to halt(8) or reboot(8). This option should probably not be used.
time Time is the time at which shutdown will bring the system down …
Well honestly, I've seen people who have managed to completely change the OS. For instance, they get a RH9 box, and less than a week later, it is gentoo. so if you do keep up with ALL the changes, it really won't be that much different, in my opinion. but as liliafan said, it is much easier saying I run <insert favorite distro here> V. x.0
Comparing RedHat to Gentoo is like comparing Mandrake to FreeBSD. They both use different packaging methods, different libraries, and have an altogether different directory structure (in some areas.)
I'd tend to think that the person started off running RedHat, then switched to Gentoo (or whatever) not by updating libraries and recompiling a kernel, but by installing the new distro in place of the former.
As far as I know, the only O/S that allows you to upGRADE to a newer version (completely, not just by updating files) are the BSDs - I've done it on FreeBSD, but haven't tried any of the others yet. You can start out with FreeBSD 4.6.2-STABLE and, after you're finished, be running 4.9-RELEASE. With Linux, it's a bit different, but essentially, if you upDATE the libraries, applications, and the kernel, you can wind up with the equivelant of a newer version. Keep in mind that there are some things that just won't run on a newer version, regardless of what you upgrade or update.
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OK, I think I've gone off subject far enough now...
If you're looking for a Linux replacement for Exchange, there's 1 that I know of. Well, 2, if you consider the secured appliance. Allow me to explain:
Bynari (www.bynari.net) makes a linux replacement for MS Exchange called "Insight Server" that was designed mainly to run on RedHat and Debian GNU/Linux.
Another company, Immunix (www.immunix.com) takes Insight Server and hardens it into a "Secure Appliance." Setup and configuration is a snap (via a web interface) - from booting from the CD-ROM to a working server is literally 10 minutes.
The reason I know this much about both products is because I'm a certified partner/reseller for each company. Mind you, I won't make any money by suggesting that you look at them (or even if you decide to go with one of them.) The reason I decided to sign up with each company in a partnership is because I've used both products, and find both of them to be outstanding performers.
There is one other MS Exchange equivelant that runs on Linux, but it's not a standalone product, meaning it's part of another solution. (Contact me privately if you would like further information on it.)
I hope some of this has answered your question. Keep in mind there are other Linux applications that claim to be on the same par with Exchange, but do your homework and read the reviews. I've tried about 14 other applications and finally settled on these two for …
A <shameless plug> is a useless code, like <rant> that isn't a valid HTML code, but is used in posts such as this, normally just to be funny. In this case, I was shamelessly plugging (advertising) my own site, hoping to draw attention to it :)
<shameless plug> If you're going to register a .com domain, you can do it for about $7 at my site: http://njcs-online.net/register.html </shameless plug>
There's a few freeware utilities that you can stick on a boot disk to reset/wipe BIOS passwords. I have a few on my laptop, and I'll post them in the next few days, if you still want/need them Or, do a search on Google for "bios reset" and have a look.
192.168 is the IP address for your computer on YOUR network only, so you would have to get a static IP, I am not sure on how to do this, just search google.
Actually, you don't need a static IP to run a webserver, but it does help. You can use a dynamic DNS service that will update your IP if it changes, so your domain will (almost) always resolve to your public IP.
FYI: 192.168. is a non-routable network address, not an IP address. 192.168.0.1 is an IP address :)
I remember the days of running eggdrops on irc... Somewhere I still have some of my old scripts, but unless everyone's on irc, they don't do much good :/
I prefer Slackware and FreeBSD. I still have (somewhere in this mess) the original Slackware 2 floppies, and I've been a Beastie since about 4.3. Why everone is so caught-up in Fedora is beyond me. (How many questions regarding Slack have you seen here? Compare that number to those using Fedora, and maybe that says something about Fedora?)
Please copy & paste your /etc/fstab here so I can look at it. All the partitions you should need should've been created during install, but for whatever reason, I have no idea what it did. Without seeing your fstab entries, I have no idea what I'm looking at.
Personally, I don't use .htaccess if I can do it in httpd.conf. Even the folks over at Apache suggest that. But I digress...
I just did a "dig" on both domains, and found some differences in the results (which should be the same, since they're both on the same box, same server, etc.)
Here's the stdout of daniweb.com:
[email="kevin@Cerberus$"]kevin@Cerberus$[/email] dig http://daniweb.com ; <<>> DiG 8.3 <<>> http://daniweb.com ;; res options: init recurs defnam dnsrch ;; got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 2 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUERY SECTION: ;; http://daniweb.com, type = A, class = IN ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: com. 1h26m24s IN SOA a.gtld-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com. ( 1080019309 ; serial 30M ; refresh 15M ; retry 1W ; expiry 15M ) ; minimum
;; Total query time: 18 msec ;; FROM: Cerberus.geekis-kahn.net to SERVER: default -- 167.206.3.166 ;; WHEN: Tue Mar 23 13:18:19 2004 ;; MSG SIZE sent: 36 rcvd: 109
Sorry I haven't replied yet, but I did take a look through your conf file, and it appears there's a number of things that are misconfigured, which would explain why you're having trouble with vhosts (multiple domains), among other things...
I would suggest taking a look at the online Apache documentation to get a better understanding on how virtual domain hosting works, which will help you understand how Apache handles it. Rather than just fixing your .conf file to make it "work" like you want, if you don't understand what you're doing, you won't know how to fix/make changes to it when you need to.
Here's the URLs for the docs you need, which should already be included in the "Manual" section included with Apache:
In order to get rid of the default RedHat page like you want, you have to reconfigure your httpd.conf without any extras FIRST to make sure the basics work, then move on one step at a time and add features. I highly recommend trashing your existing config file and starting with a fresh copy (# cp httpd.conf.sample httpd.conf) which will contain an alias to the /docs ("Manual") directory.
Also, an error I see a lot is the ServerName variable entry. If you set that as "localhost", you'll have to access it by entering http://localhost as the …
Again nevermind, I fixed it myself! Thx for nothing! Again!!!
Sometimes it takes longer than 24 hours for someone to read your post, especially on a weekend.
And just a FYI, in order to use the word "again" means you have to have stated something previously, which you didn't. As in, again nevermind. You didn't say you fixed it until AFTER that comment.
And just a note, if you want to get pissed for nobody seeing your post and responding, that's fine. Just keep that in mind the next time you ask for help and wonder why nobody responds...
I had a chance to play a lil bit with BT and didn't have any problems, which leads me to believe that your router isn't configured properly. You shouldn't have to do any special changes to your router, since the connection originates from within your LAN, and a properly configured router will automagically allow replying packets back through (unless the prot:port is blocked specifically, like for the Blaster worm or some such.)
If you're wanting to check your outside IP, you could use this address. (and yes, anything 192.168. is non-routable. I forget the RFC, but yes, you're correct :)
Try resetting your router back to it's factory settings (or just remove all port forwarding settings) and try it again. I've never used that router, but I know for me to use BT, I had to make 0 configuration changes on mine.
You could either use a redirector script (not the best way to do it) or you could make sure your httpd.conf has www.daniweb.com as the ServerName instead of just daniweb.com (if you have control over your server.) My guess is that your httpd.conf has just daniweb.com, but since I don't know too much about your configuration, I'm just guessing there :)
I'll take a look at it and get back to you later tonight. I already know the answer to one problem, but I want to verify this by checking your .conf file. As far as hosting multiple domains, again, I'll look at your current config and let you know what was wrong. If I'm in a good mood, I'll even edit for you and repost it to save you some trouble :)
NewsBinPro grabs binaries from one server, as opposed to connecting to other clients and hoping their connection isn't maxed out. I consistantly grab about 500MB worth of binaries in a matter of 30 minutes, something I've *never* done with WinMX, Kazzaa, or any other P2P application.
The only drawback to NBP is you can't search for a specific file/title, but I can live with that, since what I download isn't filename-specific.
Is there a remote possibility that it's something on the Novell server, rather than the desktop? Normally, the configuration file for backups is stored on the server, although I've never used Novell so I can't be sure.
Another thought: a keylogger wouldn't determine what gets backed up (it would create log files hourly/daily) but it could be configured to send the logs to a remote location. Try a free firewall and log all the activity for a week or so to see what outbound connections are being opened.
As far as a backdoor, even if there was a port open, there would have to be something on the firewall/router end to route connections from the outside to that IP:port, and I don't think a student would have that access. It's possible it opens a connection to the outside and listens, but again, some simple logging on the firewall should point that out. After that, you should have a good idea which backdoor is in use by using Google to find the port/backdoor match, then find the way to remove it.
Or, reimage the system if an image was created, or wipe the drive and reload the O/S.
You can use any Linux distro as your firewall if you take the time to configure it properly, or you can download any number of "boot-off-the-CD" firewall distros, which don't take as much time to configure.
As far as logins, I'd suggest only having one user account (besides root) with a password that's difficult to crack. Something like yO!*8034g7 isn't very common.
As far as cost, it's up to you if you want to spend a few hundred bucks (an up) to protect your data, or if you feel comfortable enough doing it yourself using Linux/UNIX. If you build your own box, you can add your own "bag of tricks" by adding nmap, snort, tripwire, and a dozen other utilities for intrusion detection/auditing/etc.
Just get a wireless access point, plug it into your hub/switch, assign it an IP on your network, configure WEP, and connect your laptop to your LAN in ad-hoc mode. I've had that setup for about a year now with no problems. The only difference is I have 9 boxes on the LAN plus the wireless laptop.
Let me know if you need more detailed instructions. (The user manual for the AP should walk you through everything, so you shouldn't have any difficulties.)
I'll put one together over the weekend and have it up on Monday. It'll actually be a few of them (what to compile in the kernel, firewall rules, nat, etc.)
I'm also working on a few others for FreeBSD, such as Samba, Apache, and a HOWTO for a Shoutcast streaming audio server.
