Rapid Web Prototyping with Open Source: Part 2

Posted by The Technocrat | Filed under Geeky

Internal IP’s and External Subdomains

OK, so before I do anything, I need a machine to build on. It needs to be in the DMZ, so both external and internal computers can find it. That means assigning it a static IP address, which I can look into while the OS is loading.

I make the computer name ‘intranet’, and people who are in my xyzdomain.org network will be able to hit the server in their web browser at intranet.xyzdomain.org.

For people outside my organization, I need to register a domain name so that when someone surfs to extranet.xyzdomain.org, it will hit port 80 on my org’s firewall, and get forwarded to the web server internally. Luckily, we already have a domain name, so registering the ‘extranet’ subdomain to point to the firewall (along with the default ‘www’ subdomain) is a simple matter. I’ll do all of the registration work while I load the OS on the machine.

The Operating System

My time is short, so I need something that comes ready as a web server out of the box. Since I need all open-source web management components, it’s almost a no-brainer to go for a LAMP server, that is, Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. Just need to find a Linux Distribution that comes with LAMP pre-installed. Since that narrows it down to a few hundred distributions, I’ll go with one I’ve used before: Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a great Linux distribution to start using as a workstation, we’ll see how well it does as a web server. It’s ease of LAMP-component installation is mostly what I’m interested in.

While downloading the Ubuntu x86 Install CD (617MB!), I’ll register the external subdomain and prep one of the computers I have lying around with the newest used power supply, max memory and newest used hard drives I have. After that, I’ll look far a baseline Content Management system that will form the core framework of my website.

Summary

Time Spent in this article: 20 minutes
Time remaining for project: 580 minutes
Goals accomplished in this article:

  • Prepared for external and internal access to future machine
  • Found solution for OS, Web Server and Web Application support
  • Readied machine for implementation

Comments (0) | January 27th, 2006

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