How to Set Up a Website

Part of a presentation I gave at UNC to show people (computer science students) how remarkably easy it is to create your own website that you have full control over.

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* First, get a linux box. We already have one setup here. 
* Just login, run “apt-get install apache2”
* Then, you can just go to the IP and a page will load. 
    * You do have to have root access. 
    * Network has to be open on port 80 
* Not super useful, you probably want to host from something more than an IP. 

Next slide, additions. 
* So buy a domain, then setup an A record that points to your server’s IP
* Wait for it to propagate 
* Then Apache needs to know what pages to load when someone visits that domain
* That’s where virtual hosts come in
    * So first, we’re going to make a directory called “test.com”
    * create index.html file in test.com that says “welcome to test.com”
* Go to /etc/apache2/sites-available/
* cp default to test.com.conf
* Change serverName to test.com
* Change documentRoot to /var/www/test.com
* a2ensite test.com.conf
* then run service apache2 reload
* And you’re done, you can go to your domain in your browser and those files will be loaded

* You can go to /var/log/apache2/access.log to view the access logs.
* You can go to /var/log/apache2/error.log to view errors, so see 404’s which can be helpful, etc. 


Next slide, useful things you should know. 
* You can edit the crontab to schedule processes. Crontab -e. Specify day, hour, minute etc.
* As soon as you setup a server that’s publicly addressable, after a while you’ll notice hundreds of login attempts per day, trying to brute force your ssh. 
* You can use fail2ban to mitigate, will block offending IPs on a network level temporarily to reduce load and prevent access. 
* As a linux server admin, you should enable swap as backup, in case your server does run out of RAM at some point. 
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