The Operating System Of The Server
Here i am taking a operating system (OS) from Microsoft and it is Windows 2000. It is not a server OS. It is not secure, and does not support .NET, but is still quite popular. The operating system can also be Windows Home Server, which is compatible with Windows XP and Vista clients. It is user-friendly, and has the Windows Home Server Console to administer or manage server remotely. The operating system can also be Windows 2003 Server, which supports .NET and can act as a domain controller, which means it plays a role in the logon process. Linux and FreeBSD are secure operating systems, but are very difficult to use.
You need to install Windows 2000 from the CD. To do so, you need to change the BIOS, so that you can boot from CD-ROM. Create a partition and format it with NTFS. You also need to configure the TCP/IP settings. Next, you need to go to Windows Update and install all the necessary patches to fix bugs.
Building an FTP Server
To build an FTP server, you need to download FileZilla Server, which is available in SourceForge. You need to add a new user and give him a password. You need to share the folders, which the user is able to access. You also need to give permissions, such as read (to download), write (to upload) and delete. If you want to set up a public FTP server, create a new user named 'Anonymous' and uncheck the password box. You can create a group, for a collection of users, who have the same permissions on a particular folder. You can access the FTP server by using the following URL: ftp://user:password@host:port. The host is your IP address, and the port is 21.
Instead of AppServ, you can use WampServer, which is also a combination of open-source applications in one package. The WampServer can start automatically when Windows starts, or you can manually start and stop the server everytime. The document root in WampServer is the 'www' directory. WampServer now supports PHP 5, but you can also use an add-on to support PHP 4. The normal user in MySQL is the root account, and the default password is blank. You can use the MySQL command-line tool, which brings up the console.
Instead of FileZilla, you can use the CrossFTP server. So, now that you have learned how to build a server, you can go ahead and make a personal home page or a front page for your business.
