purchased a domain, now adding / pointing iit to an at home server

[william chaple]

Hey guys, well, replied back to this

1: Turn on your web server
2: Check it's working locally http://localhost/.
3: Check it's working across your own network, from another machine http://<serverip>/.
4: On your router, open port 80
5: On your router, forward port 80 to your <serverip>
6: Check you can access your site from the public internet http://<your_public_ip>/ (this is the IP address assigned to you by your ISP, Google "public ip address")
7: Setup a "static address to dynamic IP" service like dyndns.org or something like that (you may have to pay for this). This will give you a static URL like "williamchaple.dyndns.org" that will resolve to whatever your dynamic IP is at that time.
8: If your router has the feature, configure it to regularly update your dyndns.org account with its current IP address.
9: If your router does not have this feature, configure your server to regularly update dyndns.org with your current IP address. There are free programs that can do this for linux, but it's not hard to write your own script to do it (I know this because I've done it)
10: Check you can access your site through the 'static' dyndns URL
11: Configure your domain nameservers to point to your 'static' dyndns URL
12: Check you can access your site through your domain name.

Ok, well thank you so much for all the information, this is greatly HUGE help for a newbie like me lol. Anyhow, I was wondering, is there anything else left to configure?
I have my Domain called "wichap.pw" and I have an at home Xbuntu laptop that I am going to foward the domain to. So my laptop is going to carry the wichap.pw domain; however, my internet is dynamic and not static.
Would this be a lot easier if I were to change my plan into a business account? Or is it possible to configure my xbuntu to keep a static IP address?

[Tim Cooke]

The quoted part being something I said in this thread.

I would certainly, again, question your motivation for wanting to do this as it really is a royal pain in the behind to get working. If you just want to play about with a web server then you can do that on your internal network very easily. If you just want a public facing website up and running then, as Bear suggested in that other thread, I would recommend you put your hand in your pocket and buy some web hosting to upload your site to. It'll be a lot cheaper than paying for a static IP from your ISP and a whole lot easier to get setup and working.

[william chaple]

I already have a dns hosting my domain from hostgator, but I just wanted to learn how its all done. I would potentially like to give a domain name to my at home server and make it available to the coderanch. Is it possible with a dynamic IP? Once it is up, I will take it down since I am no magician in network security =P

All of this is for knowledge and practice.

[Tim Cooke]

OK, so my checklist shows the steps you need to take to get this working. What steps have you got working? What are you stuck on?