Home web server...

[overlord20]

I have a box at home I am going to run Debian on. I am not too familiar with the OS yet but we are going to use it for a couple websites in the meantime..

The only problem is I have no idea how to do it.

One is pour clan site which is a VB CMS and the other is a Joomla CMS with PHPBB3.

We have various accounts on each page, and we also have email accounts for each website that we can not lose for any amount of time.

Is there a basic guide to it? I need to get this done as soon as possible as our host offered to let us stay only until we find a new home and we are currently to broke to afford hosting. (We did manage to build a computer that we can host from for the meantime),

All help is appreciated as I need learn this fast

 

[flyingturtle]

For your Joomla CMS, you'll need a LAMP server (Apache webserver, MySQL database and PHP)

Linode has great guides (I have my VPS on there). This one is for Debian 5 and setting up LAMP.
http://library.linode.com/lamp-guides/debian-5-lenny/

You said you also have a VB CMS. Not sure what that is, but if it's based off VBulletin, the popular PHP-based forum, then you can set that up on your LAMP server.

If you mean VB CMS as in Visual Basic CMS, then you'd need a Windows server (or host) to run it as VB and VB.NET are on Microsoft stacks, rather than the LAMP stack.

Important Note: you said you want to run the website off your homeserver. I assume you have a dedicated IP address and can transfer your DNS to it. If you don't and it's a dynamic IP address, as most home ISPs offer, then I wouldn't advise you running your site off it as your IP will change. You'll have to update your DNS everytime it changes.

If you do have a dynamic IP and still want to do it, you can use dynamic dns services, to make your hostname work with dynamic ips, which will handle it for you. Like this service:
http://www.dyndns.com/services/dns/dyndns/

For your email server, you can also take a look at the guides here:
http://library.linode.com/email/

Or you could just offload your mail to Google Apps and point your mx records for your domain name to google apps/gmail instead of having your server deal with email. Probably more reliable especially if you don't have a dedicated IP, however you' may have to alter your Joomla CMS and other CMS to use a smtp server pointed at Google's mail server instead of localhost, so it'll take some configuration changes on your part.

 

[maw]

couple other pointers.
- make sure your ISP doesn't block the default port 80, otherwise you'll have to use another port
- make sure your router is configured to forward incoming port 80 requests to your server