Hosting a Webserver from My Home Machine

**sinister** · October 13th, 2000, 05:25 PM

o.k., this may sound newbish, can't hide it!

I want to host a website from my home computer. I have a domain name already registered with network solutions. Now all I want to do is have the domain point to my machine. So How do I go about entering my IP address as the dns, and what else needs to get configured for it to work.

Thanks A Mil!!

**LunaMorena** · October 14th, 2000, 02:10 AM

Find someone with a DNS server to point to you or install BIND yourself. I reccommend going with the first option unless you want a whole new set of headaches that you never bargained before.

do you have a static IP with your internet provider? If so, great. If not, you will probably need to find a service such as dynip.org that will let you update your entries when you get a new IP.

**sinister** · October 14th, 2000, 11:42 PM

O.k., I would prefer having full control of my domain. I downloaded bind. Having trouble installing it. Any docs where I can found out how to install it on OS X?

**LunaMorena** · October 14th, 2000, 11:46 PM

do you have the developer tools installed? If not, you'll need those first.

May also want to find out whether it's included in the install or not already; there are other services installed that are disabled under X.

even once it's installed, setting it up is no picnic. Personally I still don't know the basic format of the zone files, all I ever do is copy the ones I have now and change the domains around in them.

**hotani** · November 2nd, 2000, 11:25 AM

O'Reilly has a book called "DNS/Bind": this is the DNS bible.

**akreation** · February 20th, 2003, 08:55 PM

I am trying to do the same thing (bind on osx) here is a link i found on setting up this software http://www.qwerta.com/macosx-bind-howto.html

I have not set it up yet, have you gotten your dns server working? if so, do you have any pointers?

**binaryDigit** · February 20th, 2003, 09:41 PM

Unless you're doing this as a learning exercise, I'd highly recommend that you have someone else handle your dns for you. This is esp. true if you decide to handle email services yourself, as not going without email for days because you hosed your dns can be VERY frustrating.

If you don't have a static ip then you can go with a service such as dyndns.org. They provide scripts for various os's that will automatically update your dns entries with whatever ip address you get assigned. Some routers (Netgear) actually have support for dyndns built into them.

If you do have a static ip, then you can go with someone like google, they charge 15 a year to provide various services including dns. This route is very convenient because you also get their email services (they host the smtp and pop servers) and I guarantee that my time is worth much more than $15 year.

In either case, you go over to network solutions, log into your account, and change the dns servers that you have registered for your domain to either dyndns.org or google.com (or whoever you chose to handle the dns). Keep in mind that if you do your own dns servers, you will have to make sure your dns machine stays up all the time, or things like email will fail (i.e. if someone tries to send you an email, even if you aren't hosting your own smtp server, your dns server won't be there for the sender to find your MX record to know which machine to send the email to). Now you might get lucky and the sender might have your ip address's cached, but you see how problematic hosting your own dns can be.

If you really want to try it yourself, I would highly recommend that you still use some other dns servers to act as your secondaries, again so if anything bad happens to your dns server, there will be others to fall back on.

If your just tinkering on a domain that is just for play, then go for it. Have fun with bind, you'll learn to love nslookup. Interestingly, this is one area that Win2K shines in, setting up a dns server is mucho simple.

**Darkshadow** · February 21st, 2003, 08:53 AM

I back up binaryDigit here. Unless you really know how the files work, I would go with having someone else doing the DNS for you. It is very easy to mess up a DNS server, and it can take hours/days to get it fixed and sorted out. And in the meantime, no one will be able to connect to your webserver, or send mail to you.

Also, these files are ongoing work - you have to maintain them, you can't just set them and then leave them alone.