Setting up a website on amiga

[Castellen]

I run my site directly from this A4000T, works fine.  I have a 2mbit ADSL internet connection, though uploads are limited to 128k, too bad.

As I'm serving around 300Mb of data, hate web hosting fees, want control over my own server and the computer runs 24/7 anyway, it made sense to run it myself.

As it's not serving truckloads of requests (only around 15000 hits/month in 1-2Gb), I find the GW3S ARexx webserver does a good job.

Support website here but it appears to be down at the moment.

As it stands, there is a bit of room for improvement, so over the years I've modified the ARexx code to suit my needs.
The writing of webserver logs to disk was also problematic (which appears to be a bug in ARexx file handing during multiple requests), so I wrote my own webserver logging utility in C which works well to produce Webalizer compatible logfiles without the problems that GW3S/ARexx has doing the same job.

I originally was going to use Apache, but it was a giant arse to set up and get running.  Plus I didn't need all of it's extravagant features like PHP.

GW3S is quick and easy to get running.  Requires a few entries to your Miami/AmiTCP database and a simple configuration of the webserver using the provided ARexx utility.

Let me know if you want more information or any of the webserver support apps I've written, modified GW3S code, etc.

[Castellen]

Forgot to answer your other questions...

For creating HTML pages, it's just as fast and easy to use a text editor.
I use TuiTED which has nice syntax highlighting for HTML and C.

The HTML language is fairly simple, so it doesn't take long to get your head around the basics.  Look at other websites and look at the source to see how the author has done different things.


There are plenty of good HTML/web support tools on Aminet such as HTML Tidy, Webalizer and various WYSIWYG editors (which I don't really find that helpful).

Also plenty of online resources for helping you write HTML and validation tools.

[Castellen]

For the domain name, you can pay for the use of a personalised name (e.g. doctorq.com) or go with a free domain name service, such as DynDNS.org, which has the limitation of a slightly less "personalised" domain name.

In my case I have a dynamic IP address, which means the IP address of my connection can change at random or as directed by my ISP.  So I run a small client under control of a Cron script which periodically checks the current IP address is what's registered in the DNS server.  If not (due to the IP address changing), it updates it automatically.

[Castellen]

Leave setting up DynDNS until last, get everything working properly first.  Also, don't get confused between when your router's manual talks about dynamic DNS and the DynDNS.org service.  They are two different things.

You will still be able to connect to your webserver without a domain name, just use your internet (Wide Area Network) IP address for now.  You can find out what it is using various methods such as looking at your router's internal HTML statistics page.

Using a local network computer, the webserver should work simply by pointing a web browser at the Amiga's local IP address, e.g. 192.168.1.8  If it doesn't, then get this working first.

Using a remote computer, connect to your IP address, e.g. http://202.123.45.67
The job of the Domain Name Server is to simply translate your domain name into your IP address anyway, so you're just doing a short cut for now.

For this to work, your router needs to know that it has to direct incoming web requests (on port 80) to your Amiga.  Though you have DHCP, your Amiga should probably get allocated the same IP address all the time.  Find out what this is (192.168.?.?) and use it to configure the router's internal routing table so that all port 80 requests are sent to your Amiga's IP address.

After that you should be able to connect to your Amiga webserver from an external address.

Once that's all working, you can register with DynDNS.org.  This page should answer most of your questions.  Download and configure AmiDynDNS as per the included instructions and that's all the major stuff finished.