This is the first step to setting up a software development environment at home, especially a website. Here's the first steps.
A home nameserver is not so bad if you have access to a home router with DDNS firmware. tomato and dd-wrt are both equipped with pages that can set DDNS connections and static IPs.
Tomato only works for a few routers, but some comparisons say that tomato gives better bandwidth performance.
Setting Static IPs on your home router.
Setting Static IPs on your home router.
The workhorse home router is the Linksys WRT 54 GL and the tomato firmware for this hardware makes it pretty easy to use. I bought one on EBay for $45 including shipping, but you probably should buy a new one. The firmware will let you increase the power of the transmitter and this can cause some of the rf to start to fail intermittantly so a new one is better - only $8 more. If you want more power the Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 router is a better bet. When I recently had to set up a new router, the firmware upgrade wouldn't work with firefox or chrome - I had to use IE!
To get the MAC address of your wireless network cards - you can use ifconfig/all in unix, osx or in the dos command line, or find it on the tomato Status > Device List menu when your machines are online.
The Status>Device List Menu will also list the MAC card address of all connected machines, which is especially handy if there are Virtual Machines you want to hook up.
Set permanent IP addresses to your webserver and any other machine you need named - a good time to set up a home storage server or music depository.
Its easy with the Basic >Static DHCP menu in tomato. You need the MAC address and the name you gave to the machine.
By Default, 192.168.1.100+ is the dynamic IP addresses and so you can assign any 192.168.1.2-99 address to your home network machines. Make sure you make sure the hostname of your machines are set the same with the router as well as the machines.
2. Set Port Fowarding to your web server
Get your current IP (see the tomato menu : Status > Overview)
Set up port forwarding to your webserver
if you are on a windows box, you may have to make sure that the web server on port 80 is recognized by your firewall. It should be listed here: control Panel>firewall> Exceptions.
Make sure apache is configured to serve more than just localhost.
ServerName localhost:80
is replaced by
ServerName 192.168.1.10:80
For WAMP, one of the easist installs, apache needs a * for hostname and there is a switch to put the site online.
see if you can get your web site. In my case tomato was using port 80 for its own web interface. If I changed the port number from 80. After that port forwarding on port 80 worked well.
test with my IP address in your browser. Is it live?
3. Use a DDNS service to make it available to the outside world
Most DDNS services (tomato comes with a pretty long list of them) only provide a set of pre-set domains while charging you for your own domain.
afraid.org - seems like a great service, but its a little too free for me - instead of owning a set of domains that users can pick from, afraid.org shares the domains of all the registered users to hook a subdomain onto any domain they serve for. you can pay an annual membership fee for 3+ domains which are private. On the other hand if you are actually connecting to a server through afraid.org, very few people will know they can do this.
dnsomatic.com -is an aggregator for all you anonymous dns accounts,
zoneedit.com - also has free ddns services. first five free.
I chose everydns.com for this project. EveryDNS.com provides free dns services - we can donate after we get it working. If you point to their services an adsite comes up, but that's because we are being slow, so far so good.
Most DDNS services (tomato comes with a pretty long list of them) only provide a set of pre-set domains while charging you for your own domain.
afraid.org - seems like a great service, but its a little too free for me - instead of owning a set of domains that users can pick from, afraid.org shares the domains of all the registered users to hook a subdomain onto any domain they serve for. you can pay an annual membership fee for 3+ domains which are private. On the other hand if you are actually connecting to a server through afraid.org, very few people will know they can do this.
dnsomatic.com -is an aggregator for all you anonymous dns accounts,
zoneedit.com - also has free ddns services. first five free.
I chose everydns.com for this project. EveryDNS.com provides free dns services - we can donate after we get it working. If you point to their services an adsite comes up, but that's because we are being slow, so far so good.
Set the Class to A (a full description of the DNS classes is in wikipedia). MX is for mail servers. Class A returns a regular ipv4 name.
The settings in the Basic > DDNS library work well. If you wait for the last result, it will work fine.
4. Email with Google apps
Google apps can provide email service only through your dns server and everydns.net does well.
| Fully Qualified Domain Name | (enter your domain) |
| Record Type | MX |
| Record Value: | ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. |
| If MX Record, MX Value: | 1 |
Repeat steps seven through nine for the following MX record entries:
Record Value: If MX Record, MX Value: ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 5 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 5 ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 10 ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 10 ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 10 ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 10
The last step is you have to verify your account via everydns.net or your webserver.
5. Save a back up your router settings
In the Administration > Configuration menu you can save your configuration to the desktop just in case you have to do a reset some time.
Resources:
YouGetSignal.com port checkers and other handy network tools.
Download Tomato Firmware from polarcloud.
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