Like any good techie putting together a new computer, one of the most exciting parts is the shopping. I got everything for this one at tigerdirect.com which generally has good prices, though they do a lot of rebates... which means you actually have to put in some work and send in the rebate forms to get the prices they list.
I figured I didn't need anything super fast for a box that will mostly be used for serving web pages so here are the specs:
I've tried a good number of different linux distributions. I'd been running Gentoo on my laptop for about 6 months, but I'd gotten pretty sick of having to recompile everything every time a major release of any of the base system.
You can get binaries though portage (the Gentoo package manager), but that kind of defeats the purpose of the whole Gentoo distribution. At that point it acts essentially just like a Debian distribution... so I decided to go with a Debian derivative instead since the package management systems are similar and I didn't want to be compiling.
Ubuntu is an up and coming Debian based distro. I can't stand Gnome though, so I decided to use their KDE version, Kubuntu instead.
Often people don't put KDE or Gnome on a server at all, but I want to be able to use it to test sites in Konqueror, and maybe use as another desktop if my laptop is in use for something else.
So I had to determine what exactly I wanted this box to be able to do. This is an ongoing project, but there are several main functions I have in mind for this:
First things first. I want to be able to use the server to store files so I can access them from any computer. It didn't take me too long to get Samba up and running. I can't say there were any major issues with this, and since you can probably find multiple different places explaining how to install and configure it, I won't bother to go into detail here.
Currently being worked on
It was fairly easy to set up Apache on the server. I wanted to have virtual domains, but that wasn't much of an issue. What turned out to be a bit of a pain though was setting up suPHP. Not getting it to work for scripts in a user directory, that wasn't a big deal... but I also wanted to be able to set up common scripts that could be run under the users account from common directories.
