How Do I Set Up A Webserver?

[wienerschnitzel]

I want to set up a php webserver in my house. I have win XP home and cable. I haev read a lot of things and I am still not sure how to so this. Do I need win XP pro? I tried installing win 2003 Enterprise but it keeps freezing before it gets installed (i think its my video card but that another topic). I already know how to set a dual boot into linux but I am not really sure how to use Linux. I know of apache but I not really sure how to use it. I have also set up a no-ip address because mine is assigned dynamically.

I guess my questions are this

1. What OS do I need?
2. What other software do I need?

more questions will come later if can't figure anything else out

thanks

[Somebody1234]

This would work better in softwareworld.

[balamm]

Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty - the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.
Mark Twain

[4play]

just ge yourself an old machine

http://www.linuxiso.org get yourself a linux or better yet bsd distro from there.

http://www.apache.org/ get apache from there and your set.

of course it is alot of trouble keeping up to date but is is free and fast even on an old machine.

there is also a windows version of apache. ;)

[Natsume Atsuko]

Oh oh, I found it very good to run a PHP webserver on WindowsXP Professional, Apache 1.3.27 runs really stable and installing PHP is not hard if you go by the guides (altough I had to put some files of PHP to different folders since it did not find them in the windows folder for some reason..). Also MySQL for windows is easy to install (in case you want to run forum software or similiar).

So I say go for WinXP pro and Apache 1.3.27 - maybe not the safest choice but at least it is easy to set up.

I don't think IIS is a good choice though, I had lots of problems with it (crashing, confusing the daylights out of me, just being insecure - unless you update it)

You need WinXP Pro, Apache 1.3.27 and the latest version of PHP and all will work fine. You can get all the stuff beside WinXP pro on the net for free. But since this is a KaZaa forum, I am sure you know where to get WinXP pro for free aswell. heheh

And don't blame me if this does not work out, I just talk from personal experience with servers :P

[echidna]

if you want to do this on windows try Jana Server (http://www.janaserver.de/start.php?lang=en)
it's free, unconfusing and it does the job [can install php, cgi,sql etc.]
easy ;)

[Wolfmight]

what are the user limits for machine type?

I have a 2.0ghz, DSL.

[4play]

you could probably serve your own site with a striped down linux distro on a 386 16 mhz machine with plenty of ram.

the bandwith is the main problem. but a good dsl connection should be more then enough to run a website with not too many people visiting it.