Hi all,

I am a red hat newbie, and I am trying to set up Red Hat 9.0 on an old 550Mhz, with 384MB of RAM. I own a domain name, and I want to point it to my ip address and have red hat be my web server. I have a router, but I have opened ports 80 and 443 to allow incoming http. How can I set up red hat as a web server to host my site? Also, can I use my domain that I own in order to set up red hat as a mail server? Example: if I own samplename.com, how can I set up a mail server to recieve mail at me@samplename.com? I know these are 2 big questions, but I am willing to spend the time and learn, so any help is greatly appreciated.

if you make your router forward the relevant ports to that server, then they will be used. You will require some form of external DNS provider for referencing back to your sites, and for further DNS within your control, you might want to use a service such as zoneedit.com. As far as recieveing mail etc... all down to you just configuring your mail service correctly, so read up on the documentation.

ive always had problems setting up a mail server so ill just comment on the web server part of your question.

acid_kewpie is absolutely right about the DNS settings. If the company your purchased your domain name through does not host your DNS then you'll have to find another provider. I use easydns - www.easydns.com. they can host your DNS and e-mail MX settings for your domain name. Its very cheap, easy to use, and they update their servers every 15 minutes. So if your ip address ever changes youre only looking at 15 minutes of down time (give or take)

On redhat 9 i believe the default apache server directory is /var/www

Go into your redhat Service Configurator (i believe its K-Menu - System Tools - More Tools - Service Configurator) and make sure that apache starts when your system starts. you can also start apache from this menu to make sure thats its already turned on.

Open your web browser and type in the server internal ip (192.168.xxx.xxx) It should bring up the default apache web server page. Try placing an html file in the /var/www/html directory and try it out. Let's say you have a test.html file, then you would go to 192.168.xxx.xxx/test.html and that page should show up.

from there its just a matter of moving your website content in to /var/www/html and getting the dns setup for your domain name.

Use a newer distro because Redhat 9 is now obsolete and there are no more security updates for it from Redhat. Try Fedora (which is the replacement for Redhat Linux).