General Server Setup Questions:

[southernman]

The plan is to setup a basic webserver, which will serve mostly static html pages. I may move into setting up a blog software, or some other sort of CMS in the near future though.

The server will sit on an old boxen yanked from the grips of my closet, dusted off and tested to see if it worked still... which it did of course! It's modest specs are as follows:

Dell Dimension V350
PII 350 (512KB)
128MB RAM
10GB HDD

She runs cool and quiet, and should be plenty to do what I aim to do with it.

Questions are as follows:

1- Should I just start with a basic webserver with only Apache2 or should I go ahead and follow the Debian Etch Perfect Setup Howto and proceed as written with php and MySQL.

2- I mainly will be using this as a personal/testing server, but may put some music and a few videos to share with family and friends... Being that I don't plan to try and host the whole world - do I really need to setup Quota?

3- I am not really sure about a mail system. You could say I am a bit scared of it... I suppose. I know enough about Apache to get into trouble without much effort, but I'd hate to be serving someone else's needs to send their SPAM about gender specific enhancement products. Any direction provided will be met with great apreciation (eg. links to howto's, comments like DON'T use one... anything really). :/

3a- If I do setup a CMS or Blogger system, then a mail system will be a must... correct?

4- Being that I only have 10GB of HDD, this is what I thought for a partitioning schema: (through the help of the search feature of the forum and google)

/boot - hda1 > 50-100 MB
/ - hda2 > 3-4 GB
/var/www - hda3 > All the rest
swap - hda4 > 384 MB

That is all I can think of at the moment. Any additional insight offered is of course welcome!

Thanks for reading and possibly helping out.

~ Steve

[till]

1) If you want to host just one website, then you should start right away. If you want to host more then one site, I recommend to use the perfect setup and iSPconfig to manage your sites.

2) Thst totally up to you

3) If you follow the perfect setup and install ISPConfig, you will have a easy configurable and safe mail system with spam scanning and antivirus.

3a) Yes, at least a basic setup that allows the blog to send emails.

4) Thats ok. But wih your small harddisk, I would just use a /boot partition with 100MB and then a / psartition for the rest of the harddisk plus 1GB swap.

[southernman]

Thank you for the guidance Till!

I have been working at recompiling the kernel to enable ole tux on another similar boxen. The actual compiliation has been going on now for some 3 hours. *slaps forehead* I should have known better than try something like that on such an old box.

I sorta steered clear of ISPconfig on purpose. Don't really intend to offer up webhosting services that would call for such a system. If a friend of family member wants to put a site on it, I'll probably just set it up by hand... Besides, ISPconfig looked really complicated. I do have the files and booked marked the manual so it'll be looked into more indepth at a later date for actual useage.

I'd like, once I have something setup, to post the link and maybe have a a gaggle of folks hit it and test her out to see how the machine will handle a strain. That may be a little while off yet.