About two years ago I set up an old Mac of mine, a Quadra 800, as a linux box. I did it mostly to see if I could, and I ran it on my home net for about 8 months as a testbed for various linux and webdev experiments.
I took it down when I moved a year ago and it's sat unused since then. But I'm about to dig it out, and get it online again, with a much more ambitious goal this time.
I want to turn it into a full-blown production server/host, running web service, mail, and dns.
This is a tall order, because I've never admin'ed some of these things before, but I want to figure it out.
Initially I will set it up as a subdomain of one of my existing, professionally hosted, domains. But eventually I want to get to the point where I can use this personally hosted machine for my main sites and services.
I want to gain some freedom from the restrictions and expense of commercial hosting services.
I'll be reporting here about how this process goes.
This is of more than academic interest to the "Regular People who are Geeks" audience. The idea of running a "home server", that hosts all kinds of local network services, is the thing of the future. One day a home server will be like the cable box and refrigerator. Everyone will have them.
I blogged about this a couple months ago. And the Boston Globe wrote about it again this morning.
Stay tuned.
Posted by jackhodgson at May 6, 2004 04:39 PM