Starting Out... Need Information 3

[FLASHfreak1021]

Hey Everyone
Over the months of developing my website, I soon figured out how much free webservices sucked! So, I said to myself, why not create your own webserver. But, unfortunatly, I don't know where to start. How unsafe is running apache on a DSL connection? Hackers, crackers, viruses oh my! Does apache come with a firewall? Ahhhhhhhhhh! All these little unanswered questions in my head.
Well, any reply would be helpful
Thanx,
FLASHfreak

 

[siberian]

Not really, that is controlled by your ISP.

There are programs that report your public IP address to a dynamic DNS system for real-time reassignment.

If you really want to 'host from home' pay your ISP the extra $5 a month and get a static IP address, its a lot easier.

 

[RhythmAce]

There are dns pointer services that do that very thing. Some are free if you use a sub-domain of their domain such as

http://yourdomain.theirdomain.com.

If you get your own domain name, they offer the service for a small fee. If your ip changes only every few months or so you may want to try

http://www.zoneedit.com

Here is a list of services to check out:

http://www.noip.com

http://www.dyndns.com

http://www.dns2go.com

http://www.tzo.com

 

[siberian]

ahh I did not interprete his question properly.

He asked

'Are there programs for dynamicly changing ip addresses?'

I interpreted that as changing his external IP on his router, not his DNS reported IP.

 

[FLASHfreak1021]

Hello! Where (or what) is the line in httpd.conf that you need to change to change your public directory? Because people may be able to access like the forums, and phpMyAdmin, but I don't want them to! And also, how do I make it so my computer will accept .htaccess files? And how do they work, how do I make one?

 

[RhythmAce]

Apache let's you choose who you want to allow or deny access anywhere on your hard drive. Here are a few ways to do that. First of all, apache will not allow access to anywhere outside of its web space so you don't need to worry about people trying to browse your system directory and doing a "format c:" on ya. To define the web space, apache uses a directive called "DocumentRoot". The DocumentRoot is a directory on your drive you choose to install the web pages. That directory and all its sub-directories are the web space. Let's say for your DocumentRoot you chose c:/sites/domain1/htdocs. You can control who can do what in this directory by creating a directory container and adding a few directives:

<Directory &quot;c:/sites/domain1/htdocs&quot;>

Order allow,deny
Allow from all

</Directory>

In the case where you don't want the whole world to be able to access the directory where phpmyadmin is, you would deny eveybody except from your local machine:

<Directory &quot;c:/sites/domain1/phpmyadmin&quot;>

Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.1

</Directory>

You should be able to findout more info and other directives here:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/

 

[FLASHfreak1021]

Thanks so much everyone, especially RhythmAce, you are awesome My configuration is pretty much done, I found DNS hosts and everything, i will post if I need more help. Well, I am going to the Linksys forum to ask some questions about prot forwarding, thanks again! Oh, wait, just thought of something else... How could you go about making a subdomain, like this:
&quot;subServer.mainServer.no-ip.com&quot;
And, the server package I got contains cerebus FTP or something. Are FTP servers safe, or are they hackable?
Thanks for any responses!

 

[RhythmAce]

You will want to use vhosts for all you domains and sub-domains. You will use name based addressing because all domains and subs will have the same ip. It is very easy but you will need to create a vhost for your main domain as well because once you have a virtualhost defined, the &quot;main server&quot; will no longer be served. Here is a skeleton of what a vhost container looks like. You can copy and paste them to the bottom of httpd.conf then fill them in with the real info later.

############################################################################

<VirtualHost *>
ServerAdmin webmaster@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/

http://www/domain1/html

ServerName yourdomain.com
ServerAlias

http://www.yourdomain.com

ErrorLog /var/

http://www/domain1/logs/error_log

CustomLog /var/

http://www/domain1/logs/access_log

combined

<Directory &quot;/var/

http://www/domain1/html&quot;>

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

</Directory>

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ &quot;/var/

http://www/domain1/cgi-bin/&quot;

<Directory &quot;/var/

http://www/domain1/cgi-bin&quot;>

AllowOverride None
Options None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

</Directory>

</VirtualHost>

############################################################################

When a request comes in, apache compares the requested domain to ServerName and when a match is found, that VirtualHost is served. In order for namebased addressing to work, make sure you have this directive uncommented:

NameVirtualHost *

Also make sure this directive is set to off:

UseCanonicalName Off

To my knowledge, there is no limit to how many vhosts or sub-domains you can have.

 

[FLASHfreak1021]

So, if I just add that to the bottom of my code for every subdomain I want, it will work, and I won't need to register it, cool! Haven't had time to test yet, but since Flash is client side, it will still work on apache, right?

 

[MrMMills]

OK I'm not a web designer or a security expert but I have been a Network Admin for 8 years. The one thing that I have always been told is that FTP is extremely vulnerable to hacking. *** exercise caution if your publishing and FTP site***