Home servers, anyone?

[Richard Gaskin]

Bob Sneidar wrote:
 > OIC. I'm assuming you've spoken with the ISP about a fixed address.

I have a convenient 5-IP package at the office, but the price to get 
that at home is way more than I'd care to pay, even for a single fixed 
IP, since they only offer that for commercial services.


 > If it's a home level DSL, they won't want to do that, because
 > technically you aren't supposed to be running a server.

Some DLS ISPs don't care because that's provided over a dedicate copper 
pair like the old POTS.  AT&T, for example, tells me straight up that if 
I wanted to run a farm of Minecraft servers on my DSL service that's 
okay with them (of course they may just be relying on the knowledge that 
their DSL speeds are too slow for running any public server <g>).

Historically cable had prohibited servers because coax is shared with 
neighbors.  But I'm finding more and more cable co's are so hurting from 
backlash against the increasingly famous customer service (if you live 
outside the US you have no idea how bad it is here) that they're opening 
up on that, allowing at least personal home servers (and with the 
growing interest in NAS/private clouds it makes good sense).  In my case 
I went the extra mile and got explicit permission from my ISP, but for 
the super-low traffic load I'm anticipating from my tests I'd doubt they 
would have noticed anyway.


 > The best way to go about this is to set up an authoratative DNS 
server for your "domain". Here's a good article on the subject.
 >
 > http://www.boutell.com/innards/authoritativedns.html

I thought about that, but then I'd have to add DDSN under it and in 
general I try to avoid having to maintain services beyond what I'm 
working on.  I'm happy to leave DNS, SMTP, etc to others to take care of 
for me so I can spend my time on HTTP.

Well, that and some superfluous LiveCode, of course. :)


Roger Eller wrote:

 > I know someone that had a dynamic setup like you describe.  It was
 > simple and easy for 1 person access.
 >
 > He had a local script checking the IP every 5 or 10 minutes (at home).
 > When it no longer matched the last known IP, the script would write
 > a small text file TO A WEB SERVER that was hosting a site he owns.
 > Then from anywhere, he could access that file to find his way back
 > home (so to speak).

Exactly.  I figured a quickie app to POST the current IP on boot from 
the client would suffice for the cable service I have, and when 
accessing it the web server CGI can reply with a 302 header based on 
what it got from the home server's POST to automatically forward me to it.

It would probably be even simple and more useful to just use a DDNS 
service like DNSMadeEasy as Graham suggested.  But that would still 
leave one feature missing:  superfluous LiveCode. :)

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com