MakeUseOf » server

5 Reasons Why You Should Make Your Own Server

Danny Stieben — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:31:02 +0000

You’ve probably heard at some point that servers aren’t only for those that have a lot of money. In fact, anyone who has a spare box sitting around somewhere in their house can have their very own server, slaving away at whatever whims you may have. Although it sounds very cool, it does take some effort and a little know-how to get it all set up.

So, before you get all sad and throw that spare box in the dump, here are five reasons why you should take the effort into making your own server.

1. You Control Your Data

If you’re an avid user of the Web, you probably have all kinds of information spread out over multiple servers and websites. For example, chances are you use Dropbox. Although it’s extremely convenient, your files are ultimately stored on their servers, so that means they control your data. You can protect yourself through different methods of encryption, but the storage location stays the same. You can change that by setting up your own server to hold your data. That way, what’s yours stays yours, and it will stay that way as long as you run your own server. With good security, other prying eyes won’t be able to see what you’re storing on your own server, so privacy is included.

2. You Build Your Own Services

With your own server, you can do whatever you want with it. Run an email server to handle all your email (although saying goodbye to Gmail would probably be the hardest thing known to a geek), a proxy, FTP server, and many other combinations. You could even run your own version of Dropbox with enough help, or create your very own services that you may be in need of. The possibilities are endless, and you get to choose.

3. No Surprises

Since you’re in control (this is pretty much the main idea), there won’t (or at least shouldn’t) be any surprises when it comes to your server. Aside from the small possibility of hardware failure, nothing in terms of the services that your server offers should suddenly change without you doing anything. While third party services may change the way their services or products work, yours won’t. You configure it to exactly how you want it, and then it stays that way until you change it again to meet your needs.

4. Have Fun With Your Server

In the spirit of control and adding whatever you please, why not install some game servers in the meantime? There are so many different games such as Minecraft and Urban Terror that have software for servers that you can run to host your very own games. These games can have their own rules and customizations, making it even more fun for you and all your friends. Again, the possibilities are endless, and you can run as many different game servers as your RAM will hold and your CPU can handle.

5. It’s Pretty Inexpensive

The costs of running a server are actually pretty insignificant, especially when you don’t need it at all times of the day. Your server will more than likely need to be connected to the Internet, but unless your regular Internet connection has major limitations that can’t let you successfully run your server on that connection, you can use the Internet connection that you’re using for your desktop or laptop right now. You can also get a free DNS name from a few different places like DynDNS if you don’t have a lot of needs for your server so that you can connect to your server without having to remember an IP address that might change occasionally.

The software should be free in most cases, and the operating system will more than likely be Linux (it’s recommended, anyways), so no costs will appear there. In the end, it’s really just the cost of electricity, which can be managed if say the server doesn’t have to be on while you’re asleep.

Conclusion

Running your own server brings many advantages that could make your life a lot easier and less stressful. After all the work in getting it set up, you can pride yourself in the fact that you have your very own server that you can do whatever you want with. In the end, it should be well worth it, with a spare box well used. If not, you can always check out this MakeUseOf guide to giving that old box new life.

Do you have your own server? What have you done with it so far? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: Shutterstock

How To Set Up An Apache Web Server In 3 Easy Steps

Danny Stieben — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 17:30:49 +0000

Whatever the reason is, you may at some point want to get a web server going. Whether you want to give yourself remote access to certain pages or services, you want to get a community group going, or anything else, you’ll need to have the right software installed and configured for that to happen. So how exactly can you do that? It’s actually quite simple.

My operating system of choice for this article will be Fedora Linux, as Linux in general is known for getting servers up and running quickly, and easily. In addition, Fedora is well supported by both a community and a corporation, has great security, and offers graphical configuration tools for multiple servers.

Step One: Installation

New Install of Fedora

If you don’t have Fedora installed on your system yet, you can do so with the DVD because you can also choose to install Apache at the same time. If you take this route, while installing from the DVD you’ll be able to choose which packages you want to install with the “Customize Now” switch. Choose it and then under the Servers tab, you can select “Web Server”. Go ahead with the installation until you can boot into your new system. From there, you can install the graphical configuration tool by choosing the package system-config-httpd from your package manager, or run sudo yum install system-config-http.

Fedora Already Installed

If you already have Fedora installed, you can install both the web server and the graphical configuration tool. You can install the httpd and system-config-httpd packages from the package manager, or run sudo yum install httpd system-config-httpd.

Step Two: Configuration

You can now start the graphical configuration tool from System Tools –> HTTP. The first tab you’ll see is the Main tab, where you can configure the server name, administrator email address, and under which addresses the server is available under. I recommend that you add an address right now, and choose “All available addresses” on port 80 for simplicity.

The second tab contains the different virtual hosts, or the number of different websites on the same server, that are configured. The server can differentiate what domain name was entered into the browser and therefore choose the correct virtual host when displaying a page.

There are plenty of different settings that you can choose for each virtual host, including the necessary components as well as hard-to-configure ones such as SSL (HTTPS). For a majority of items, the graphical configuration tool should be able to take care of your needs.

The final tab has everything to do with performance and the amount of connections that are allowed. There are no recommended settings as each server has different capabilities, so if you have a larger website you’ll need to play around with these numbers and see what works (provided that you have enough traffic to test out the settings correctly).

Additional Needed Configuration

Before you can actually access your new web server, you’ll need to open your terminal and then run sudo service httpd start to actually start Apache and sudo chkconfig httpd on to make Apache start at every boot.

Step Three: Testing

Step 3 in our process is simply to test out whether you can access your page or not. On the same machine, open up Firefox and type in localhost or 127.0.0.1 to see if you get this test page (provided that you didn’t change the document root):

If not, you may have done something wrong in your configuration or not started Apache yet.

Conclusion

It’s pretty cool to have Apache up and running on your very system, considering that it’s the same technology being used by most of the websites you visit every single day (including MakeUseOf). If you want other machines to have access, you’ll need to go into Fedora’s firewall configuration utility (installed by default) and make sure that HTTP (Port 80) is open. Also, if you want to run more complicated web frameworks such as forums or WordPress, you’ll have to install MySQL and PHP as well, but I’ll leave that for another article.

How easy do you think this process is? What do you like or not like about Apache? Let us know in the comments!

Browse Your Website Files Without FTP Using AjaXplorer

Ryan Dube — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 21:30:01 +0000

If there is one thing that really annoys me about working with a remote web server is the fact that it is still a bit inconvenient to explore and edit those files remotely. It’s especially inconvenient when I have a home web server that I’ve built and control myself, but I still have to FTP into the server to browse website files, or to upload and download web pages and other files.

Sure, I could share out the directory over my home network and just transfer files that way, but that doesn’t really help me when I’m away from home and connecting into the server elsewhere on the Internet.

If you’ve ever used a commercial web host before, then you know that many of them offer a much more user-friendly, graphical interface to remotely access your web files. In many ways, that interface feels basically like a file explorer that you’d use on your home PC. The only difference is that you’re logged into your web server and accessing the files through a web-based interface on the online control panel.

Now, we’ve offered a lot of useful articles at MUO about setting up web servers quickly using software like XAMPP or Server2Go, but it’s high time you start upgrading those servers with a few bells and whistles.

Setting Up Your Own Graphical File Explorer

The truth is that you can set up a similar file explorer on your own web browser. If you can access it via HTTP, then you can connect through this file explorer. The open source application that accomplishes this is called AjaXplorer.

Installation is as easy as downloading the files and placing them into your public documents area on your web server. You can install it directly into whichever root folder where you would like the bottom root directory of your file explorer to be. For example, in my case I installed it into a subfolder called “xplore”.

In that case, I’ll never be able to get further down into htdocs. This is actually a good setup if you have multiple websites in different subdirectories and you want independent file explorers for each. Just put an install of AjaXplorer into each folder.

When you first access that folder on your website (in my case, http://192.168.x.xxx/xplore/), the script will check to make sure whether all of your server settings are okay. You may see the following error if you’re not using SSL encryption. If you’re concerned, enable encryption. Otherwise, you can blow right past this, AjaXplorer will still run fine.

You’ll notice that there’s virtually no setup if everything goes smoothly. When the application first starts, you can initially log in using “admin” as both ID and password. Remember the change it after you log in under the “settings” section.

When you log in, you’ll find yourself in an empty folder with only a “Recycle Bin” as company. You are looking at the root folder where you installed the application. If you had installed this in the root of your web server, you’d see all of your web files listed here.

Manipulating the directory is as simple as right clicking on any of the white space and using the menu that pops up. For example, if you want to start creating new directories, just select “New Dir”.

In my test case, I created a folder called “testdir” using AjaXplorer and saw it show up in the directory. Just to confirm, I went to the web server and browsed over to the actual folder under /htdocs/xplore/ and sure enough, there was the “testdir” folder I created.

Along the right pane, you’ll find a directory navigation window that is just as easy to navigate as any file explorer software. I found that browsing on AjaXplorer was far easier than the standard online file browser that came with my own commercial web host account.

My favorite part of AjaXplorer is the fast editing feature. Once you’ve created files on your web server, all you have to do to edit them on-the-fly is right click on the file and click to Download once. Once the application establishes a local downloaded copy, you can then right-click on the file that’s listed on the server and make edits. There is no need to worry about uploading or downloading – all file syncing is done behind the scenes.

When you right click an HTML file, you’ll also notice that you have a “Source Editor” option. In Source Editor view, you get a built-in coding editor. If you create an HTML file with AjaXplorer, it’ll automatically fill in the basic structure of an HTML page for you. All you have to do is fill in the content.

When you’re done, click “Save” at the top menu, and your changes are instantly live on the server. If you choose to view the file in an “External Window”, it’ll open up a new window (or tab) that displays your page in html view.

Toward the lower left corner of the explorer window, you’ll find the settings. Here, you can browser users, monitor diagnostics, and best of all there are logs of every change that’s made.

The standard setup and security settings may not suit your needs, so make sure to review the instructions on the help page on how to configure the config.php file. You’ll find that file under the /server/conf/ directory of your AjaXplorer install.

If you want to get away from constantly uploading and downloading files every time you want to make changes on your web server, download and install AjaXplorer and see how much time it saves you during your web development. You may be surprised!

Give AjaXplorer a try and let us know how you liked it. Was it easy enough to use and flexible for what you need to do? Share your experiences with it in the comments section below.

Image Credit: ShutterStock

How To Set Up Your FreeNAS Server To Access Your Files From Anywhere

James Bruce — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 19:01:13 +0000

FreeNAS is a free, open source BSD-based operating system that can turn any PC into a rock-solid file server. Today I’m going to walk you through a basic installation, setting up a simple file share, and setting things up so you can access your files from anywhere over the Internet using the encrypted secure FTP over SSH option.

Requirements & Alternatives

To set this up today, you either need a working FreeNAS installation already set up and running, or:

The latest install ISO from the FreeNAS download page.
A spare computer or VM.
A USB stick 4GB or larger.

As well as to set up remote access, you’ll also need:

The ability to configure your router to either forward ports or setup dyndns addresses.
An ISP that doesn’t block every port.

If FreeNAS isn’t your thing, here’s a few alternatives:

Microsoft Windows Home Server is my current choice of home file and backup server, and is an absolute steal at just $49 for an OEM license.
Amahi Home Server is a free, Linux-based solution that comes complete with an app store for adding functionality with one click installations. It’s well-developed, but some features such as disk pooling are still a bit sketchy for the average user and it does sometime require a little command line hacking to get things just right.
A router with DD-WRT hacked onto it and a USB hard disk attached could also perform the same function, but again there’s a lot of hacking involved to get it to work right.

Installation

First up, FreeNAS isn’t something you’ll be dual-booting, and it doesn’t even come with a nice graphical partitioning utility. If you install to your nice 1TB drive then the space will be wasted. You need to install FreeNAS to either a USB drive, or an SD card if your PC supports them.

If you’re unsure, try on a virtual machine first (our guide to VirtualBox should help you there). To write this guide, I used Parallels on the Mac, but it has issues booting from USB devices so you’ll need to create a separate 4GB internal drive for it to install too.

Upon booting, choose the default option at the top and be sure to choose the correct installation location. Remove the CD or detach the image when done, and reboot.

Once installed, there should be a web GUI URL listed, so you can switch back over to your main PC and continue to configure things over the LAN.

Click on Users -> Change password to harden the system – by default there’s no admin password set. Next, click Users -> Add User and go ahead creating your own regular user account. We’ll use this to authenticate later.

Configure A Share

Configuring a share involves first adding a ‘volume’ – that is, a hard disk – then creating a share. If you have more than one drive, you can configure them as a software RAID too for increased data integrity, but I won’t be going into details on that today.

Click on the storage button on the top menu.

Click create volume. The name you assign doesn’t really matter, but you’ll need to ensure you check off the drives you want to be in the volume. For our purposes, I have one drive I’ll be adding to it.

You should now see that you have 1 ‘active’ volume listed. Click change permissions and make the owner of the group the user you created before, as well as turning on the checkbox for the Group ->Write permission. In a real world scenario, you would create a group for all users and assign ownership to that rather that to an individual user, but for the purposes of testing, this is fine.

Next, click on the sharing tab. Here you can choose between Apple, Unix or Windows shares. I’ll switch over to a Windows share for now and click Add Windows Share. The only difficult part about what comes up next is choosing the folder – I just made mine the root of the /mnt/drive1 volume that I added.

You’ll also need to enable the CIFS service, which starts the Windows share ‘listener’. Click on Services ->Control Services from the sidebar and toggle on CIFS. Toggle on SSH while you’re on this screen too, which we’ll use later to do secure FTP (don’t enable the regular FTP service though).

At this point, you should be able to access the share from a Windows machine – if it doesn’t show on the network yet , just type \\freenas directly into the address bar to force it. If you type //freenas, you’ll access the web GUI instead – good to know.

Now that you’ve confirmed the Windows share is working, let’s move onto remote accessing your data.

DynDNS

In order to use a simple URL to access our files, we’re going to be assigning a free dynamic DNS address to our home IP. Head over to DynDNS to set up a free account.

You’ll need to confirm the email address too. When that’s done, you’ll be presented with a service plan page. In small writing at the bottom is the link to set up your free account for up to 2 hostnames. Click that.

Enter your desired hostname (you can select various domains from the drop-down), then click on the blue text that lists your IP. This will automatically fill in your IP address.

Port Forwarding

This is a different configuration for every router, so it’s really hard to show you how it’s to be done on your exact model. For mine, I accessed the router configuration at 192.168.0.1, and clicked on Port Forwarding.

You need to forward the SSH service port – 22 – to your FreeNAS internal IP. This is .11 in my case.

Test:

First, let’s see if regular SSH works. From a linux or OsX terminal, type:

ssh username@domain.dyndns.org

The username you set up earlier, and the domain is the address you chose at DynDNS . You may get an error about verifying the authenticity of the host, but don’t worry, type YES to connect anyway.

If you see a bunch of text, you know it’s working.

Now open up your favourite FTP program and enter in the same details – username, the DynDNS domain, the password – but make sure the protocol is set to SFTP – this is crucial.

If all went well, you should be presented with a straight overview of the whole filesystem, so you can now drill down into the precise folder or share you want access to. Congratulations, you now have complete access to your shares from anywhere in the world!

We have really only just scratched the surface of how powerful FreeNAS is – I hope to highlight some of its other features in the future, so stay tuned. I hope you also tried copying a file across to see how blazingly fast it is too. Problems and comments are welcome as always but if your problem is really technical, you might get a better response by crowdsourcing it to our tech answers site.

Is Windows Home Server The Most Reliable Backup & File Server?

James Bruce — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 19:01:30 +0000

Windows Home Server is one of those obscure Microsoft products that you never knew you needed. It’s rock solid reliable, simple to manage with a familiar Windows interface, and my personal choice for a home file server and backup solution. Let me explain what it is and what it can do for you.

What Is Windows Home Server?

Based upon Windows Small Business Server 2008, Windows Home Server is a consumer-focused server operating system with Windows 7 at the core. It’s been hardened on the security front, slimmed down on the desktop features, and performs a variety of tasks that can really simplify your home computing life. It’s designed to be left alone in a cupboard, constantly on and working, but you can still run a lot of regular Windows software if you want. Full remote access is provided so you can log in and manage your server from any client in the house (or over the Internet).

In hardware terms, if it runs Windows 7 relatively well it will run WHS2011 just fine too, though if you’re building your own machine I’d suggest skimping on the graphics card and getting more memory instead.

Cost – & The Alternatives

Before I start introducing you to features, let me say upfront that Windows Home Server 2011 costs $49.99 if you purchase an OEM license – which means you’ll have to build the computer yourself that you plan to install it on. Legally, you shouldn’t buy OEM versions if you’re installing it onto an existing computer, but I’ve also heard it said that simply changing one of the cables or upgrading the memory classifies you as a “system builder” and therefore qualifies as OEM.

If you’re interested in purchasing a complete, ready built home server computer (usually with a wonderfully small form factor), check out the hardware section of the Microsoft site. The HP MediaSmart is a popular choice, and costs from $400 to $1,000 on Amazon. Of course, there are free alternatives that handle all the features that Windows Home Server can, and possibly more – but personally I find the complete package that Home Servers offers to be more reliable and less of an effort to maintain.

Amahi Linux is the most feature rich alternative, but the file duplication options aren’t quite there yet.
FreeNAS is a solid fileserver / router linux distro, definitely for advanced users only. I plan to write an updated article on it, but for now we covered it once before in 2009.
We regularly cover backup solutions.
You could “roll your own server” with Ubuntu Linux, which could run on older hardware too.

That said and done, let’s look at the features provided by Windows Home Server 2011.

Automated Backups

One of the main concerns of home users is how to implement a decent backup system. For me, this means full data backup, as well a bootable system backup so I can be up and running again soon. If you have more than a few PCs in your house, managing all those backups becomes a constant mess of USB drives and various free apps to handle bootable partitions and…..well let’s just say it’s just a big hassle that I don’t need. WHS handles backing up all your PCs and data with such simplicity, it’s hard to believe it’s a Microsoft product.

Once connected to the server, your computer will be set to back up automatically. That’s it. You can view all the connected PCs from the WHS dashboard and adjust settings for backup frequency or when to delete old backups, but the defaults are fine and it all just works.

In the event of a catastrophic drive failure on that machine, you need only change the drive for a working one, and boot from the supplied WHS recovery CD. All your data and system will then be restored in just a few clicks, over the network, from either the most recent backup set or any archived sets.

File Server

With full user access control, WHS is the most reliable file server I’ve used yet. It also gives you the option to backup those file shares, of course.

Yes, you could just share some folders from any Windows 7 PC, but as anyone with home networking experience knows, the results don’t always work as expected. It’s difficult to set up fine-grained access control without a central user server.

Media Sharing

As well as a secure file store for your media, WHS also allows to share your media with any standard DLNA device – the Xbox 360 for instance. Not limited to your home network only either, you can access your media remotely too over the internet – to show relatives a slideshow for example. You can also upload files to your server which is useful if you’re out on a long holiday.

Admittedly, movie streaming isn’t a feature I use often and various codecs can present a problem.

One minor useful feature for me is the ability to automatically archive shows and movies from your Windows Media Center (another fantastic Microsoft product I highlighted last week). This means you can keep all your media centralised and avoid having to put huge drives into your living room HTPC.

It’s Windows 7!

One of the problems with customised Linux distros is the fact that an entire computer is given over to the task, and all other little Windows apps I like to run suddenly need Linux alternatives. Not so with Windows Home Server, as it’s still a functional Windows environment. However, Home Server doesn’t run some of the more advanced Windows components and isn’t suitable for gaming, for instance. Media Center is noticeably absent.

I do hope you consider using Windows Home Server to handle your homes file and backup needs, but there will always be free alternatives if you’re prepared to put in the time and effort to make it all work. If you have any questions about Home Server I’d be happy to answer them in the comments, or as ever feel free to share your own choice for home backup and file servers – I’d especially like to hear of any complete solutions that are relatively easy to set up. In the coming weeks, I’ll highlight some of the add-ins (plugins?) available for WHS2011 too, that add even more functionality to your server.

3 Methods To Host Your WordPress Blog Images On An External Server

Jeffry Thurana — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 17:31:04 +0000

One of the biggest burdens of any website are the images. So it’s only logical that you can lighten the load of your sites – and make them faster – by hosting the images on a speedier external server. These servers are known as CDN’s (Content Delivery Network) and usually come at a price.

Today, we are going to look at some free image hosting alternatives to host your WordPress blog images on external servers. These solutions might not be as top notch as dedicated CDN’s, but I think they are good enough for the regular everyday blogger.

The First Alternative - Loadtr

The easiest alternative I can find is Loadtr because all you have to do is add a WordPress plugin. The problem is, not everybody feels comfortable hosting their images on an unknown image hosting service. To be honest, I’ve never heard of Loadtr before, so I can’t tell you whether or not this service is good or bad. Even though a quick web search told me that Loadtr is a well-known service in Turkey, the name is not a familiar one in the rest of the world.

Anyway, if you think you can trust Loadtr enough to use the service to host your blog images, you can start by going to the “Plugins – Add New” side menu in your WordPress installation.

Then search for and install the Loadtr WordPress plugin.

You’ll then find an additional upload menu in the post editing mode. It’s the colorful small icon next to the other upload icons above the writing field.

Clicking on the icon will bring out Loadtr’s Image Upload tool. You can choose the image file you want to upload, pick a language, give a short description, and select the size you want.

After the image is uploaded to Loadtr’s server, you can insert it into your post by clicking the “Send to Post” button.

Then you can publish the post, and the image will be displayed without a problem in your blog post.

The Second Alternative - Dropbox

Another place you can use to host your images is Dropbox. There are several plugins which will help you connect your WordPress blog with your Dropbox account, but I think the best one is Pressbox.

After installation, go to the “Settings” sidebar and choose Pressbox.

You will see a set of instructions to get a Dropbox API. Both the “Key” and “Secret” codes are needed to connect your blog to Dropbox. This step is needed to prevent unauthorized access to your Dropbox account. Follow the instructions to the letter and you’ll be just fine.

After acquiring the codes, press the “Connect your Blog to Dropbox” button and you can start using images in your Dropbox folder for your blog posts.

But why go through all that trouble if using images from the Dropbox public folder is as easy as copying and pasting the public URLs (as discussed in this article)? Well, first, Pressbox allows users to use images from any folder within your Dropbox account. Second, users don’t have to go back and forth between their blog and Dropbox account to fetch the image’s URL. Instead, you can easily add images using Pressbox’s code.

Pressbox also allows users to set their default path for a file list and favorite folders. You can use the “/Photos” folder as the default, but I’d suggest you go one folder deeper. Create another folder inside Photos and use it as the default.

If everything is set, you can easily put your blog images inside your chosen folder and add them using “[pressbox path=/Folder/imagename.extension]“. So if you want to add sunset.jpg inside the Pictures folder, you will write [pressbox path=/Pictures/sunset.jpg].

You can also browse and insert the pictures you want via the new “From Dropbox” menu in the “Add an Image” pop-up window.

The only thing you should consider if you choose to use Dropbox is the storage limit. With a 2GB storage limit for free accounts and an average 100KB image size, you can store up to 20,000 images. It’s a good idea to create a new Dropbox account specifically for this purpose.

The Third Alternative – Hotlinking

If you prefer neither Loadtr nor Dropbox, then you can choose the more traditional (and manual) approach – store your images in one of the available image hosting services – such as Photobucket and Flickr – and hotlink the images in your blog posts.

To do that, you have to make sure that the image hosting services that you use allow hotlinking. Then acquire the image link, and insert the link via the “From URL” tab in the “Add an Image” window.

This third alternative might not be as convenient as the previous two, but you get peace of mind from a trusted and reliable free image hosting service that you love.

Will you host your blog images externally? Which one is your preferred alternative? Do you know any other alternatives? Share your thoughts and opinions using the comments below.

Take A Look At James’ Home Setup [Show & Tell]

James Bruce — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 19:31:12 +0000

Taking a break from our regular awesome software reviews and tutorials, I thought it’d be interesting if myself and some of the other staff writers here at MakeUseOf show you our own home setups – whether that be in the form of fantastic custom desks, complicated home media-streaming networks, or just the apps and services we make use of on a regular basis and our favourite software tools. It’s also a good chance to clean my desk up a bit.

Main Computer

My main work machine is a 27” iMac. Bored of sitting all the time and for health reasons, I switched the desk legs for some extendable ones at IKEA and I now have a fantastic simple standing desk that’s actually really solid. If you already have a suitable desktop, you can pick up just the legs for about $100. I do need to do something about the cables though.

I have a second monitor beside it which runs Windows 7 inside a virtual Parallels machine, mostly used for testing purposes and because it’s much easier to take screenshots with a virtual machine.

Network

With a total of about 10 clients, everything in my house is networked together – including the TV. Where possible, I run a wired ethernet connection. No matter how good your wireless router is, a wired connection is always going to be faster, especially important when shuffling around large files and streaming HD movies. The main router is a stock firmware device given to me by my cable company – it’s good enough, and acts as both a 4 port switch and a wireless router. To extend the network upstairs, I then have a separate network switch connected via a simple crossover ethernet cable.

The number of devices is perhaps a bit excessive, but most are old laptops that wouldn’t sell anyway, and like most geeks I can’t bear to throw hardware away.

If you’d like to learn more about setting up a home network of your own, be sure to read our Easy Guide to Computer Networks for a great primer on the topic.

Home Server

Sitting in the cupboard is my home media, backup, and file server. Right now it’s running Windows Home Server 2011 – I know we’ve covered a lot of free alternatives before (such as Amahi and all these), but ultimately I prefer the stability of a Windows server and the fact that apart from being a rock solid server, it can also run Windows apps at the same time. With 2 x 1TB drives, it’s able to backup all the Windows machines on the network automatically, as well provides a remote time machine based backup for any Macs (though I don’t use that). Apart from the usual Windows file-sharing, I also run Plex Media Server which I showed you a few weeks ago. That’s then able to serve movies and TV shows around the house with full metadata information and covers automatically downloaded.

Of course, with all that space it also runs uTorrent. Rather than use the built-in uTorrent remote access, I prefer to have Windows Remote Desktop activated so I can use the entire desktop remotely. You can set this up on any Windows 7 machine easily using new features introduced in the Windows Live Mesh app. For security, any traffic to the outside world is secured across an anonymous VPN – I use VPN Tunnel (a paid, unlimited access service perfect for torrents).

Situated in a small room with a window upstairs, it’s also ideal as a motion-sensing security system using a webcam and a suite of tools I showed you before. When activated, the system can send Growl alerts to my mobile and around the network. Learn how to set up your own free home security system here.

Media Center

Though the TV is able to read some files straight off the network, I prefer to use my media centre PC and just output to the TV. This avoids any format issues, and allows me to have wonderful metadata and covers from Plex as I said, streaming from the server – this is done through XBMC and the PleXBMC plugin. Last week, I hacked the Xbox360 Kinect camera into this Windows PC to let me control XBMC by frantically waving my arms around, but plugging the camera back into the Xbox got tiring quickly so I’m making do with a long-corded USB mouse until I get a chance to test out some remote control apps. Android owners have a free official app from XBMC, and here’s a free app for iOS that handles Plex, XBMC and Boxee – I just haven’t got around to trying them yet!

To be honest, there’s quite a few Media Center apps you could use, and it’s really down to personal preference which you choose in the long run. Some of the writers here prefer Boxee, which I’ve yet to try myself but apparently has great social features, while others go for a straight up XBMC install, with all the hacks and tweaks that involves.

Web Services

I must admit I’m quite minimalist when it comes to web services. GMail and Reader have permanent tabs in my Chrome browser, and I have the obligatory Facebook account. Other than that, I don’t tweet, and virtually all my web browsing originates through various feeds in Google Reader. Sorry to disappoint, but I’m much more of a hardware and networking kind of guy.

That’s it from me, but I hope you’ll get to see what works for other writers in the coming weeks, so stay tuned and we can both look forward to reading those. As ever, feel free to comment or ask questions and I’ll do my best to reply. For general questions, you might want to ask in the Q&A part of the site, where our regular contributors and eagle-eyed editors jump at the chance to share their computing knowledge.

Image credit: ShutterStock

How To Set Up Your Own FTP Server With Core FTP

Ryan Dube — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 16:31:52 +0000

There is one thing that I do almost constantly during my day job that I realized I don’t really do at home. That is creating an FTP server where you can retrieve files from within one sub-network while you’re anywhere on a LAN, or in the case of a home FTP server, accessing files from the larger Internet.

For something like this, a lot of people immediately consider a long list of file sharing solutions like the 5 browser-based P2P file sharing tools Tim mentioned or the 4 file sharing applications he wrote about that communicate over the Internet. We’ve covered lots of FTP clients, and Varun showed how to enable the Windows FTP service to serve out files from your own FTP site.

The Windows FTP service is useful for quickly sharing files without the need to install any new software, but it is also limited as far as functionality is concerned. For things like security, extensive user management or handling multiple domains easily, outside free FTP server software can offer some pretty cool advantages. One of my favorite tools is the free Core FTP Server.

Setting Up Your FTP Domain

I’m going to show you how fast and easy it is to set up an FTP server on your home PC with up to three domains where you can assign specific users and passwords that have access to specific directories on your PC.

When you first launch Core FTP Server you’ll see a blank domain listing where you can get started configuring your three free FTP domains. To do so, just click the “Setup” button.

The domain setup is where 90 percent of the configuration takes place. You’ll see, buried on this page, not only the ability to configure your FTP domain, but you can also enable signed certificates for access to the FTP server, virtual paths that users can navigate when they connect to your server, lots of security options like SSH, SSL, etc.

If you’ve purchased certificates, click the “Certificate” button to set them up. If you don’t have one, you can set up your own “Self signed certificate” with the screen below.

The fastest and easiest way to set up the server (although obviously not the most secure), is to just configure “localhost” with the standard FTP port and set up a root FTP path where anyone connecting to your FTP server can obtain files. You can also create sub-directories for individual users, and you set these up when you configure secure user accounts. You do this after setting up your domain by clicking on the “New” button next to the Users listing.

Here, I’ve set up a user called “ryanfriend1” that will have access to the “ryanfriend1” sub-directory upon logging into the FTP server. As you can see, Core FTP Server offers a whole list of options per user that you can configure like download and upload speeds, timeouts and even limit the amount of KB the user can download.

On the left navigation bar in the user setup box you can also click on the “Permissions” link to block or allow file and directory access permissions for that user.

Back on the main screen of Core FTP Server, if you click on the “Access Rules” button, you can specifically block an IP or domain, or a range of IP addresses, if you ever have the need to.

Once you’ve set up at least one FTP domain and a user, go ahead and click on “Start” and you’ll see the server launch in the activity box at the bottom of the main page. When you see that the server is “active…”, your users are almost able to access your FTP server. You still have to forward incoming FTP inquiries to your new FTP server.

First, open up a command prompt on the computer where the server is running and type “ipconfig” to check your IP address. Once you have the address for the PC, you’re ready to set up your router. Log into your router admin page and (in the case of a Linksys router) click on Applications & Gaming. For other routers, find where you can configure Single Port Forwarding.

Enable FTP port forwarding to the PC address where you’ve enabled your Core FTP server. Once you’ve started your server and enabled router forwarding, you’re ready to connect to your FTP server from anywhere in the world. To display this, I used my laptop to connect from outside my home LAN and opened up a command prompt. I quickly did an FTP to the IP address that I know is assigned to my router from our ISP (if you don’t know, just visit a site like WhatIsMyIp from your FTP server PC to find out).

As you can see above, the server welcomed the user with the message that I defined for that domain. It let the user that I defined log in using the assigned password only, and it issued the exit message upon disconnecting.

The whole process of setting up a fast and simple FTP server with password protected user access takes less than 15 to 20 minutes. Core FTP makes it really easy to open up a directory or directories to yourself or to your friends from anywhere in the world with a functionality that goes much beyond the default FTP service that comes with Windows.

If you’ve tried Core FTP Server, share your thoughts about the pros and cons. Do you know of any other comparable free FTP server software? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

The Various Forms Of Website Hosting Explained [Technology Explained]

James Bruce — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 17:31:30 +0000

Every website on the Internet needs to be stored somewhere, and that’s what we refer to as “hosting“ – but what exactly does that mean? With so many different ways of hosting your site, it’s easy to get lost in the internet tubes. Let me guide you through some of the many ways you can host your own website, as well as how much it’s likely to cost (if anything), and the advantages and disadvantages of each.

If you’ve been meaning to start a blog, but find the choices overwhelming and the jargon mind-boggling ““ or maybe you just want to satisfy your technological curiosity about how the Internet works ““ then read on.

What Is Web Hosting Anyway?

A website host is really just a computer that is on all the time and connected to the Internet. When you visit a website, you’re downloading some files from the machine that stores that particular website. The truth is that any computer can be used to host a website, even the one you are using now – but the computers used by professional hosting companies are incredibly powerful with lots of hard disks and memory, highly optimized to deliver the website files to thousands of readers simultaneously. The machines are stacked up high, and there are no keyboards, mice or monitors to be seen.

So – You Need A Website Host?

There are various ways of hosting your website, so let’s take a look.

Hosted Services

The first and simplest kind of hosting is creating a sub-website within a larger site, usually for a specific application like a blog. There are so many hosted services on the Internet, but here are some specific blog examples, all free:

WordPress.com – Free, but your blog will be hosted at a URL such as myblog.wordpress.com (unless you pay a premium for your own domain). You will get to choose from a restricted set of blog themes and plugins, and generally can’t do anything beyond the basic setup.

Blogger.com – owned by Google, Blogger gives you a little more flexibility with regards to writing your own theme code, but the plugin selection is limited and the Blogger branding is everywhere. Frankly, there is a reason WordPress is top – but it’s good to have a choice anyway.

Advantages:

Simple to set up and get started.
Generally good speeds as the company is specialised and good at what they do.

Disadvantages:

Very little control over the technical side of things. Non-approved plugins not supported, although Blogger is a little more flexible.
Portability: If your blog does get popular and you have a subdomain from a free hosted service, then moving to your own host later becomes difficult and you’re liable to lose some of the fans you’ve built up when the domain changes.

Self-Hosted

If you want to go the DIY free route, then it is in fact entirely possible to host your own website at home, on your own Internet connection – but you should be aware that most ISPs don’t approve of this and it may be in violation of your terms of service, so do check first.

We’ve written a few guides before on how to self host a website on a spare computer, or even within Windows on your main computer.

Advantages:

As much computing power as you have to throw at it.
The ultimate in freedom to do whatever you want with your site.
Free.

Disadvantages:

A fairly high level of technical knowledge, or the patience to learn.
The speed of your website will depend upon the upload speed of your internet connection, which is both slow and very limited. Bear in mind that any upload traffic you use to host your site will also count toward your ISP’s monthly quota, if they have one.

Shared Hosting:

So called because you share a hosting server with thousands of other websites that are also stored on the same computer. Shared hosting is the budget option – prices and packages vary greatly – most will come will a free domain name registration and so called “unlimited bandwidth and storage”, but don’t be fooled. Shared hosts rarely allow anything other than basic web files – so you can’t use that unlimited storage to backup your computer, for instance.

Perhaps the most famous budget shared host is GoDaddy, with plans starting at $3 a month. There are also lots of free shared webhosts, but you really do get what you pay for.

Advantages:

Budget, and a great way to start out with your own custom domain.
Easy install options for popular blogging and forum web apps that mean you don’t need a lot of technical knowledge.

Disadvantages:

Incredibly slow.
Anything beyond a basic blog will get warnings from your host regarding CPU and memory overusage.

Virtual Private Server & Dedicated Servers:

These are the top 2 levels of website hosting, and mean you get the whole server to yourself. The difference between Virtual Private Server (VPS) and Dedicated Server is that a Dedicated Server is a single, physical system which you essentially “rent” inside of a data center. A VPS is a single, virtual machine – similar to the way you can use Parallels to run a virtual machine inside of your OSX install. MakeUseOf is hosted on a dedicated server.

My personal recommendation for a VPS or Dedicated server is Media Temple. Their VPS starts from $50 a month, while dedicated servers start at $750 (yes, you did just read that right).

Advantages:

(Nearly) Unlimited domain hosting.
The fastest hosting available (just to illustrate, I recently moved my iPadBoardGames site from shared hosting to a VPS, and the page load time dropped from an appalling 10 seconds to under 2.5 seconds).

Disadvantages:

High level of technical knowledge required.
Expensive.

Starting Out

If you’re serious about starting a blog, I really suggest you skip the free route and head straight to a shared hosting account. Yes, it may cost a little, but it will save you so many headaches down the line – and there is a psychological effect that if you’re actually paying for it, you’re going to put more effort in. When the time comes to upgrade – then you can easily migrate to more a more professional solution. The learning process is one hell of a ride, so what are you waiting for?

Image Credits: Shutterstock 1 and Shutterstock 2

Free Server Uptime Check and Status Monitoring With Cloudkick

Dave Drager — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 16:30:20 +0000

If you run any servers – either your own personal home server or for a business – you should be keeping tabs on the health and availability of your systems. A dead server is a useless server, so making sure you are aware of any outages is an important part to running one.

Cloudkick was one of the hottest startups of 2010 and was acquired by Rackspace in December. Their whole business model is system monitoring as a service, with a lightweight client installed on the server reporting back to their monitoring servers operating in several different datacenters in the U.S.

The Cloudkick platform works on Windows and Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS and Redhat) and also comes with easy configuration for several providers such as Amazon EC2, Linode, Rackspace and other VPS/Cloud providers.

Is Cloudkick a good option for you to monitor your system(s)? Let’s go over the setup and what you get from the Cloudkick platform.

Setting Up The Cloudkick Agent

The first thing you will do is sign up for a developer account on the Cloudkick website. They have several paid options available as well but the developer account will allow you to have one server with comprehensive monitoring: CPU, memory and more; and also unlimited basic checks on an unlimited number of servers which include HTTP/S checks, Ping, SSH, DNS and TCP Header check (regular expression check).

Installing the Cloudkick agent is detailed on their wiki for all platforms. We will go over the Redhat/CentOS platform for the purposes of this article, but it is mostly the same for all other operating systems.

First add the Cloudkick yum repository to /etc/yum.repos.d/cloudkick.repo:

[cloudkick]
name=Cloudkick
baseurl=http://packages.cloudkick.com/redhat/$basearch
gpgcheck=0

Install the Cloudkick packages:

yum check-update; yum install cloudkick-agent

and then run the configuration utility:

[07:38][root@server:~]$ cloudkick-config
Welcome to the Cloudkick configuration utility. This will securely
use your Cloudkick username and password to generate an API key
for the Cloudkick Agent.

Username: username
Password: **********
Writing configuration to /etc/cloudkick.conf
All done!

You will then probably want to edit /etc/cloudkick.conf to add your server name. Create a new line and add the following text, using your server name in place of serverXX:

name serverXX

Finally, enable the cloudkick agent to run on startup:

[07:41][root@server:~]$ chkconfig cloudkick-agent on
[07:42][root@server:~]$ service cloudkick-agent start
Starting cloudkick-agent: [  OK  ]

That is all you need to do from your end to install and register your system in the Cloudkick system.

Setting up Monitors

The next time you log into the Cloudkick dashboard, you will see that this new server has been added to the system automatically. You will then need to set up alerts (also called Monitors) to go along with your server.

For the free checks, we will add a basic availability check on our server(s). We will check SSH availability as well as PING response times just for demo purposes. You can use any of the ‘basic’ checks or one or more of the standard checks depending on what type of account that you have signed up for.

After adding these monitors, it will start collecting data for your system. The Cloudkick interface has a lot of graphing options, allowing you to monitor these services over time and give you an idea as to how responsive your server is.

In addition to the pretty graphs and charts, you will also have alerts sent to you if any of the services go down. You can set it up so that it will trigger an alert after 1-3 errors and can also have it alert you just once or on a continuing basis. For extra bonus points, you can set it up so that it will text you on outages or also pipe it to a push service such as Boxcar.

Will Cloudkick Work For You?

Cloudkick is great if you have a small number of servers and you are looking for basic monitoring. The pricetag is certainly right for this type of uptime and health monitoring. However once you start adding servers with full checks to your account, the price quickly goes up. There is some great free server monitoring software available out there which are open source and free such as Nagios and Zabbix, and both would be compelling alternatives if you are looking for more detailed checks on multiple servers and are willing and able to set up the infrastructure for doing so. But for a personal home server or even a couple of servers for businesses, Cloudkick is a useful service to sign up for and it is very easy to get started with. Check it out and let us know what you think!