Wednesday, 23 August 2006

How to setup a home web server - the Red Hat way

In previous posts I have explained how to set up apache server to serve webpages on ones personal machine. But then I explained how to do it the Debian way. Obviously there are other ways of doing the same thing. For instance, if you put the same query (of setting up apache webserver) to a person running RedHat, the steps he will list out will be some what different from what I had covered. By now you will realise what I am getting to. There is obviously a Red Hat way of doing things and a Debian way of doing things.

In Debian based distributions, the apache webserver uses a modular structure of storing configuration information using different files for each site which makes it less cluttered. Where as in Red Hat, you have a single flat file called httpd.conf in which you add all the configuration details of each site.

Jeff Goldin has written an excellent article which explains the Red Hat way of setting up a home web server which makes a very interesting read. But apart from the minor differences, the article contains lots of information like the type of hardware to select, the partition scheme to use, increasing the level of security of the webserver and so on which I believe are important concepts which could be applied while hosting a web server in other Linux distributions too.

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