I love having new projects to work on in Linux, as it provides another opportunity to learn more about this family of operating systems. One such new project was the one that is spoken of below.
A few months ago, one of my co-workers hatched an idea. You see he had got his father’s music website hosted professionally and decided… Hey! Why don’t we do it ourselves with open source software? This would mean making music available so that it could be streamed over to whoever wanted it pretty much as a file server.
I thought it was a great idea, especially if we could make money from doing the web hosting ourselves. In the future perhaps we could expand from one website to others, and pretty much build on what we have hardware-wise over time.
I must admit though I am rather apprehensive as I am not very knowledgeable when it comes to servers in general. Also I have been searching for information online that has been quite confusing as I am running into conflicting advise. Of course, this is to be expected as people will often have different opinions even on the same exact issue.
I got rather frustrated with all of this and so I considered abandoning the project.
Today however, I thought about really educating myself on this subject and then being in a position to intelligently make a decision on the feasibility of this project. I just don’t want this to turn into a disaster that bites us in the butt later to be honest.
It was also decided that, instead of using Ubuntu Server, we would use a vanilla installation of Ubuntu 12.04 and just add the needed packages so it could also be used as a server.
Well that’s pretty much where we are at the moment. I will be keeping you guys abreast with the progress we make and any suggestions or comments would be warmly appreciated. Bye for now.
You could investigate setting up the server yourself with the LAMP stack. That is a very common platform for major server configurations and there are many tutorials that will walk you through the basics in 30 mins. Plus you get the benefit of understanding the basic components used by major hosting companies. One thing to think of though, if your friend wants to use a home computer as a server over his Internet connection he will need a fixed IP address. Many ISP’s don’t allow you to run a server from home so he might want to check his TOS before doing that. However, you can still set up the LAMP stack on a computer to act as an Intranet server for an in-home network.
You mention you have a small collection of older computers, do you participate in any volunteer computing projects?
Thanks so much Mark. That information you shared with me will prove quite useful. I do have several older PC’s but they were given to me by friends who just didn’t want them anymore.
Hey i do like to work on Linux and yeah I’m trying to get along Linux on my own but I’m just a beginner in it….
OK, well despite what some will say. Linux is not only for people that already know a lot about computers. I started this blog and a lot of my posts are about me learning as I go along, so I am no expert. So feel free to read my blog posts as they should be of help to you.
k thanks..
no problem and if you have friends that wanna learn about Linux feel free to send em to my blog as well. Have you downloaded a version of Linux yet?
Your brave! Not ventured that far myself…
Well thanks I am just learning as I go along. Its been a lot of fun so far