So Bored With Computing… I Built My Own Web Server

by Christopher Paul on October 5, 2007

Wow! My first post using WordPress 2.3!

Anyway…

Besides doing the automated install of WordPress 2.3, my computing life has been pretty boring. I have no new gadgets to keep me busy and no cool programs to toy with. All I’ve been doing with my computer is the normal web surfing, iTunes listening, and working at odd hours (thanks to Parallels running Windows XP on my Mac).

But I have this old computer and my very powerful PC that I built by myself. Well, with the help of my friend. It just sits there, though. Unpowered and unused. Until last weekend…

Or maybe it was two weekends ago…. well, anyway…

I took my desktop Ubuntu build and wiped it clean. I was still on 6.10 since I got my Mac mini in December-ish of last year. Plus, I have 7.04 on my IBM laptop so I hadn’t been using it in a long time. I installed Ubuntu 7.04 Server on it and started to set up a website. But not just a website, WordPress!

Man, the folks who are behind Ubuntu are great. Canonical has done such a great job with Ubuntu; Linux wouldn’t be what it is today without it. All I had to do to get my webserver up and running was type the following line of code:

sudo apt-get install wordpress

That’s it!

Well, to be honest, there was more to it. I did have to figure out how to configure a few things here and there to get the install working the way I wanted but it wasn’t more than a few lines of code in a text editor. I didn’t even need to actually use the computer in the typical sense. I installed OpenSSH before I started the whole process so I used the terminal app built into OS X to do everything.

So now, if you go to my internal address of 192.168.1.106, you get to see my WordPress 2.3 blog. Next week, I’m going to try and build a firewall/router out of the other computer using Linux, natch. I’ll create some route statements to direct web traffic to the web server and open it up to the internet.

So, like I said, I’m bored with my computers. Bored enough to build my own web LAMP server and future firewall.

Yawn…

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