any server gurus out there?
windoze
Registered Users Posts: 2,830 Major grins
before u respond, just remember it's gotta be in "layman's terms" or i wont understand it........
i work in a school. we have internet service but we are not allowed to let the students make a web page on the internet.
im using 14 emacs.
how difficult is it to set up a server ( if this is what i need ) in our school so that i can have my students make a webpage and post it on the internet, but it stays only within our school? ( does this even make sense?) is this possible?
its related to photograhy because they want to post pictures they took with digital cameras.
troy
i work in a school. we have internet service but we are not allowed to let the students make a web page on the internet.
im using 14 emacs.
how difficult is it to set up a server ( if this is what i need ) in our school so that i can have my students make a webpage and post it on the internet, but it stays only within our school? ( does this even make sense?) is this possible?
its related to photograhy because they want to post pictures they took with digital cameras.
troy
0
Comments
What you want is entirely doable. You could use Windows or Linux or even
OSX for your server OS.
If I understand your requirement, it's to keep the web pages off of the
external network and make it available only within the school. Totally
doable and it should be straight forward to do. I'd rate it a medium
difficulty project.
that would be totally awesome and i truly appreciate the offer,
most of the students i work with dont have access at home to the internet. they all know about websites like "myspace" and stuff like that. i am NO WEB genius, but i know how to use iWeb and .mac. I want to to teach them to make a website but im not allowed to let them post to the "outside" internet. i kinda have to make it so that they can only use the internet within our school - even though our schools internet reaches out there....
i know this makes no sense, but Ian's response is what im talking about...
if i get permission to use something like smugmug with the students then i hope you dont mind if i holla back at ya!
troy
what you said is exactly what i want to do!!! but i dont know even where to start.....
any suggestions to get me started using a server w/ mac os
troy
Hi Troy,
I've done exactly what you're wanting to do, but I was using Linux. However, it looks like the key ingredient, the Apache HTTP server, is built into Mac OS X. Take a look at this article on the O'Reilly Mac Dev Center. It should at least get you started.
In my case things were almost trival. My Apache server runs on a network that has no electrical connection to the internet.
In most applications you'll have your internal network that gets access to the internet through a router. The router handles passing traffic from your in-building network to the internet, and vice versa. There will be some way to configure the router to block web page requests from the internet getting to your Apache server. Since users on your network are on the same side of the router as the Apache server, they can still have the access they need.
If you have several small networks in the building that are isolated from each other and each one has it's own access to the internet, you can still get the access control you're looking for, it will just be a little more work.
thanx, you gave me enough info to digest, so that i can get the help i need to make it work it out......
i REALLY APPRECIATE the time you game in your response!
troy
All routers inherrently block all inbound requests (via NAT), unless specifically asked not to via either their own configuration interface or UPnP. Since Apache is not a UPnP application, the only way to open it up to the internet behind a router is to manually tell the router to forward port 80 (or potentially 443 if HTTPS is involved) to the fixed IP address-Apache server.
A potential suggestion - if you've got a spare iMac or PC around that you'd like to dedicate to a server, installing Ubuntu Server would be a fairly easy route to getting an in-house webserver since Ubuntu Server has a built-in, preconfigured LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) configuration. This would save you the hassle of getting PHP and MySQL installed, which are generally required for pre-packaged programs like Gallery and Wordpress. Feel free to post questions; Dgrin seems to have quite a sever-guru following
a ton of flexability. Including the security and access control your message
implies.
As far as machines go, you could run this on a PC with a 80g drive. Another
disk would give you the space you need for the student's web homes. It
doesn't need to be rocket fast either. Just have a good network connection.
Ian
The server could live on the schools network, but only those addresses on the schools network could get to the website
Check into firewall setting/ip tables, deoendiung upon which flavor of OS you end up using
Andy
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All router/firewall combo devices block inbound traffic by default (they'd be horribly insecure if they didn't), so by default there's no configuration needed to keep the webserver invisible from the internet; you don't even need to configure the software on the machine doing the serving itself, as long as it's behind the firewall. The only reason to configure anything is if you want the webserver visible on the internet.
The only exception to this rule is if you have a UPnP capable router (almsot all consumer level devices and some enterprise level devices) and are running RaidenHTTPD, as this is the only UPnP compliant webserver I've come across. In this case you would have set things up (either on the server itself or in the router to disable UPnP) to block the webserver from anything but the internal network.