My first Server Project

I've decided to learn something about running a server by setting one up in the office. If all goes well I hope to migrate our website off of the shared hosting and onto my own machine which will run on an empty desk near mine. This will actually save some money since we are being grossly overcharged by the hosting co. The real reason I'm doing this though is of course because I hope to learn something.

I have an old machine sitting around. I'll use it first. If we need something more powerful I'll request it after I've at least got things working with this one.

hardware:

• CPU: Pentium II/Pentium II Xeon/Celeron (501.14-MHz 686-class CPU)
• HDD: 9787MB [19885/16/63]
• NIC: RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX

platform:

• I decided to install FreeBSD 5.3
  

I determined that I wanted to go with a BSD since our shared hosting server was running FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE-p28 (VKERN). I had heard of NetBSD and OpenBSD too. My decision to go with FreeBSD was based primarily on the quality of their documentation.

• www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html