personal web server and adding a CMS

[Sup3rkirby]

Well, I'm sure there are a lot of you who know about web servers and a lot of you who know about CMSs. My problem consist of both. Well, let's not call it a problem yet. Right now I'm simply on a quest for knowledge.

Ok, so I have sucessfully set up a personal web server on an old computer in my room(Abyss if you must know, yes, I don't like apache). Well then I went and set up a domain with dyndns to stray from using my ip as the address of the site I wanted to run.

So now my next step was to add some users, but of course these users would need a way to access and edit their files on the server. Thus a CMS comes into play. So I chose Joomla for the time being as it seems to be a very nice free and open source CMS. There might be better but this is a first run server that isn't meant to be the best.

Well, since I haven't done this yet, I can't complain about problems, but I would like info from anyone who has set up a CMS on a personal server before. For instance, how can I access the CMS from the internet? with host I've had before you either use the domain and then specify a port(www.website.com:1234) and then you will be prompted for a password. Well I don't think dyndns really supports that, in fact I'm not sure how dyndns works with other folder references(like foo.dyndns.org/content/about.html). I don't believe you can link to other folders and location like a normal domain, but only link to your ip(and main home/index page) with a dyndns address.

So this is my next and biggest step. All I need is for this CMS to not only be installed, but be accessible from the internet without the use of my ip address. Does anyone know anything about this, if so please fill me in with as much information as you can.

I don't plan to run a business really, just have some simple server storage with a few accounts. The CMS will be nice and usefull as I can seperate the accounts and provide a well designed and functional method for each account to work with their personal files. I would just go for FTP, but then I'd have to set up an FTP server, and that isn't what I was going for. Right now just Web, since I'll have some pages of mine to be displayed as a site.

 

[Slothie]

Dynamic dns works exactly the same way as if you had a .com

You could even look to foo.bar.org/content/asdasd/awe123123/asdsadas23/asdzx/zczxczxc/index.html and it wouldn't even barf.

You just have to make sure that port 80 or whatever port you want to run your webserver on is accessible on the internet (i.e. You are portforwaded).

 

[Sup3rkirby]

Ah, so it does. Thank you very much for that bit of info. I think my problem is trying to access a port for the admin(with the colon followed by a port number) but I only forwarded port 80(for web access), so by simply forwarding the admin login port as well, this will work using my dynamic dns address.

And I tried the folder thing to learn it does indeed work(don't know why I just didn't try that before).

Well this is all good news and right after I get mysql installed I will install joomla and give that a whirl. Hopefully all will turn out as good as it has been and I'll have a halfway decent personal server running.


Oh, and btw(to anyone), are there any good and free web stat tools for web servers(not website statistics like hits and such). I would just like to have some stats on my server(mainly on the speeds as this is a concern of mine).
And also along with that, is there a good and once more free 'network monitoring tool' someone could recommend? DynDNS has one that cost a good bit per year. I would like something that could email me when the server goes down or is having connection issues. Since I can't be around to baby it all the time it would be nice to get a notice saying something is wrong so i can put some attention to the issue.

Once more, thanks Slothie and thank you to anyone else in advance for futher information.

 

[KzarE]

Unsurprisingly, this topic has answered a few of the questions running through my head, as I plan to be getting one or two personal server(s) of my own in the not too distant future (one built to be a server, not a recycled old computer). I'd like to thank you for that.
On a lighter and entirely offtopic note, do you play on a normal or private Gunz server? I personally prefer private, as the ijji servers have been a bit iffy when it comes to hackers (as in it's usually hard to find a a game without one).

 

[Sup3rkirby]

Unsurprisingly, this topic has answered a few of the questions running through my head, as I plan to be getting one or two personal server(s) of my own in the not too distant future (one built to be a server, not a recycled old computer). I'd like to thank you for that.
On a lighter and entirely offtopic note, do you play on a normal or private Gunz server? I personally prefer private, as the ijji servers have been a bit iffy when it comes to hackers (as in it's usually hard to find a a game without one).

First, about GUNZ, well, I've always played on the public servers. I used to play on the international servers for a while, then moved to the ijji servers. I haven't really noticed any hacking though. So i've never played on a private server, how populated are they?

And about the web server stuff. It is nice that this thread could be helpful. Personal servers are very nice in most cases. While they can't really beat a professional server(with the high HD capacity and extreme bandwidth limits), they are great for a lot of personal things where you won't need the high caps.

Personally, I would rather host some things on a personal server than public, one thing is, you set your own rules. Not that I ever really violate the rules of any host I've had, but there are no requirements or obligations. You can put what you want up when you want it up and so on.



Now, right now I'm having trouble finding a CMS for my server. I tried Joomla and that was a mess. I just don't like it really as I was looking for something closer to cPanel, but it doesn't have to be that fancy as I want it to be free or open source. I have my server running(Abyss X2) and PHP 5 installed with MySQL 5.1 installed as well. I plan to get a mail server running soon, but wanted a decent CMS that is easy to use and set up before I handle mail. So any suggestions for me?

 

[Slothie]

That really depends on what kind of stats you're looking for. You could try awstats which parses apache's logs (if you run apache) or else you could just search around online for a PHP/Perl statistics package.

A good place to start would be www.hotscripts.com


As for the CMS, it best to just play around until you find one that you like. The most popular ones are phpNuke, Drupal, Joomla

 

[KzarE]

As he said, PHPnuke, Drupal are good. PHP Fusion is also okay, from the times I've used it.

There are a few good Gunz servers around, best one I can recommend is DR Gunz (http://www.drgunz.net), they've got full custom map support (Heard of GTK Radiant? Legion from Gunzfactor made a compiler that creates Gunz .mrs maps with Radiant) and a great admin team. Next best is Legacy Gamers, although they often have server problems. ijji's servers may have cleared up since I left, it's only been four months.

I plan to be getting two server computers. I'm actually starting to think about the system specs to run a Gunz server... they wouldn't be too high, logically, since most of it is Peer to Peer connections unless you run the NAT network as well. If they weren't too big I might make the very first Australian server (for those of us that speak English, so we don't have to go to K/J Gunz).. except good internet is expensive like running a damn lottery here. I'd probably have to put the server itself in my Brother in law's place in Sydney (god knows he already has a good ten or twelve servers in it) and buy the net connection.