It all came about because I got involved in the software development of the freeware game Alien Arena (a 3D first person shooter based on the quake source code) and we needed a secondary master server geographically distant from the primary master in the US - so this machine go set up to do this.
Since it was up and running it made sense to also use it as a web and mailserver. We turned it into a tracker for games servers worldwide (which have to register with the master servers to work), and they can be seen at
http://www.chaingun.org/browser/Setting up a web server isn't that complicated - most people these days have an ADSL router of some sort, and it's just a case of configuring the router to direct server traffic at the right computer (which called port forwarding).
The other thing that's needed is a static IP address - IE if you turn the router on and off, it doesn't get assigned a new IP address by the ISP.
Then for any given domain name there are "records" associated with it, for example "www" which is configured with this IP address.
So a web browser looking at
www.biopowered.co.uk will look at the www record, and be directed to 87.194.132.220. Because it's a web page request will open port 80 (http) on the router there to ask for it. The router transparently sends this on to my little server which generates the page and returns it to the router - to the outside world it appears as though the router served the webpage directly.
Then you can have multiple domains pointing at the same IP address - another example is
www.chaingun.org - this also points at 87.194.132.220, but the server can distinguish between requests and serve the right pages for the right site (which is called "virtual hosting" since there isn't one machine per site). There are quite a few that lurk on the server - another being
www.wastevegetableoilsouthampton.co.uk. It makes setting up new sites no more expensive than registering and configuring a new domain name.
Slightly trickier is setting it up as a mailserver, as most ISPs block user side mail ports, so you have to get special dispensation to do this from the ISP, as well as register this thing called a "reverse DNS entry" - this effectively identifies the IP address as belonging to a particular domain name, and is required to deliver mail to some of the big mail sites like hotmail.com.
There are a few other tweeks to the ADSL link itself to reduce latency (mostly for the gaming side), and it helps to have a fast uplink rather than a fast downlink, but that's all there is to it really.
The real fun and games come with security - the machine gets scanned at least three times daily, each time followed by scripted attacks when the scan reveals the presence of a server - linux servers are especially valuable to those that administer botnets. But I'm happy to say these have been fended off for years, as I've got it very tightly locked down - and the router runs special software to spot and block a lot of attacks before they even get as far as the hosting machine.
Running the server was a hobby I was obsessed with before I got into bio.
