My home PC connects to the Internet via a cable service. The advantage of this service is that it gives much higher connection speeds than a conventional modem and is ‘always on’. What this means in practice is that a subscriber is automatically connected to the cable network when the PC is booted. The IP address of the machine, although technically dynamic, is in practice reasonably static – mine hasn’t changed for months.
Any computer, big or small,
connected to the internet must have an IP address to provide for the routing of
information. Home users accessing the Internet via a modem are assigned an IP
address for the duration of their online session by their Internet Service
Provider (ISP). Because the address changes with each online session, it is much
more difficult (but not impossible) for such users to run a Web Server.
Many users create their web
pages using an application like FrontPage or DreamWeaver and publish them to a personal
web server on their PC for testing purposes. When they’re happy with what
they’ve developed, the pages are uploaded to the space allocated to them by
their ISP and a web site is born.
Here’s a little
experiment you might like to try. Create your web pages and publish them to your
personal web server. There are a number of ways you can check to see if
they’re working OK, but a simple one is to open your browser and type either
the name of your computer (e.g. mybox) or localhost or 127.0.0.1 as the address.
If all is well, go online and check your IP address. If you’re using a
Microsoft operating system you can find this
in various ways. Now ring a friend and give him the address. When your friend
goes online and enters the address in their browser - bingo – they’ll be
looking at your pages, and you will be running a web server !! (By-the-by, if
you have a firewall, and you should have !, you’ll need to configure it to
allow http access)
Now back to my experiment !
I run three operating systems on this machine – Win 98SE, Red-Hat
Linux, and Windows XP home edition. My main workhorse is XP which I like for its
stability and ease of operation. Sadly, the home edition is not supplied with a
web server, but there is a ‘work-around’ – here are installation instructions
but bear in mind this will be unsupported by Microsoft (I had some problems with
the final part (13) of Pippo’s otherwise excellent instructions, so if you
need my revised ones click here
Well that solved the first
problem but is it really practical (and legal !) to run a web server on a home
PC with cable connection ?
Broadband services – cable and DSL (the latter is considered by many to be the superior choice) – offer internet access speeds far greater than that of a conventional modem. However, two things have to be taken into account. Firstly, these services are asymmetrical – the downstream speeds are much higher than the upstream speeds. This is great when you’re internet browsing – much more data comes to you than you send in return – but is a real disadvantage when it comes to operating a Server. With such limited bandwidth you couldn’t expect to support more than a handful of visitors to your site (especially if your site contains resource-hungry multimedia features and large files for downloading).There’s also the issue of neighbours (isn’t there always ?!) If there’s someone in your street who’s on the same service and downloading massive files every night, your own site is bound to suffer. Luckily, that doesn’t seem to happen here and downloads are consistently fast. I’ve tried many speed tests but most only show downstream speeds. http://www.dslreports.com/stest?loc=1 gives both.
So far as the legality is
concerned, I’m not too sure – there’s much conflicting advice out there.
It's clear that there are many hundreds of thousands of 'home' web servers world
wide, so presumably most providers do not enforce the 'small print'. So I’m
assuming that if my web server is educational, small-scale, non-commercial and
largely text based, then I won’t receive a late-night call from men in blue
uniforms !!
What about the PC ? Well, nothing special to report there. AMD Athlon processor ‘clocked’ to 850mhz; 512mb of SDRam, and XP Home edition running on a 20gb hard disk. (A separate 30gb hard disk is dual-booting with Red-Hat Linux running in a 22gb partition and Win 98 in the remainder) I swap between the two hard disks as required via setup at boot time.
In a sense I’ve now
reached my first milestone. The next step is to sort out a domain name and a DNS
server.
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