That’s highly problematic and reduced the experience of many visitors that discovered the site for the first time. Ghacks will be up and running on the new server in less than eight hours if everything works out as planned. You will then be able to enjoy a better connection to the web server that will serve the website faster to your local computer system. It can take between 24-48 hours before all DNS servers have propagated the changes and are routing users to the new server and not the old one.

The worst case scenario is that something goes terribly wrong during migration which could mean a short, medium or long outage or even a transfer back to the old dedicated server for the time being until the problems have been sorted out.

There will be no more posts until the migration is completed. Comments that are posted today might not be taken over to the new website as well. If you want to contact me use the contact form on the top. Thanks for your patience and lets hope for the best!

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It has been created by the same developer who created Tweet My PC, a software program that would accept commands from a Twitter account to manage the computer system automatically.

Remind Me About is different as it comes as a service offered by the software developer and also as a version that can be installed on a server to run it more privately. It basically works the following way: The user sends a message to a Twitter account that has been created to handle the reminders. These reminders will be stored in a database on the web server running the scripts. Another php script will be checking the database frequently for reminders that are ready to be send out. If those reminders are found they are send out using the same Twitter account.

The php scripts have not been published yet officially by the developer but are going to be released soon. They do require a web server that supports php, MySQL databases and Cron jobs. Running the script on a web server can make sense for several reasons including Twitter Api limitations but also privacy or security related concerns.

The script will be published by the developer soon. As of now only the reminder service setup by the developer is available. No Twitter information (other than following and being followed by the Twitter user the service is running on) are required to use it though.

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A lot of research should go into such a decision and that’s what I did. One tip that I would like to pass on is to take a look at the dedicated server forum over at Webhostingtalk. Web hosting companies post special offers in that forum that will give you benefits such as double bandwidth, server memory or discounts on the price.

My business partner and I moved our Windows 7 website recently from a hosting company in the UK to Wiredtree in the US using one of the discounts found in the forum to get a great managed server for a good price and absolute reliable and fast support.

I decided to do the same and order a managed server at Wiredtree. Here is what I got for the yearly price of $2315.8 (second year will be $199 less due to setup costs which would reduce the price of the server by $25 per month for its lifetime which means it pays of after eight months). I got a deal with double server memory, bandwidth and a discount of $70.

Intel Core i7
12GB DDR3
Primary Disk:250GB 7.2k RPM SATAII 16MB Cache

Plan is to add another server with a faster hard drive (raid I suppose) that will run the database eventually. The server is currently setup by the Wiredtree support team who will also handle the migration of the website. It could mean some downtime in the next days but the website will definitely benefit from the new server with speed improvements.

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Opera Unite is modularized and comes with so called services that can be installed to extend the functionality. This may remind many users of Firefox add-ons but it is actually a completely different technology that requires more than just clicking on an install link. Currently seven services are offered, they are:

• Media Player – Accessing the music collection from anywhere on the Internet.
• File Sharing – A way of sharing files directly between users.
• Fridge – A note leaving application that other people can use to leave notes on a computer system.
• Web Server – Hosting a web server from the local computer system.
• Photo Sharing – Share photos without uploading them first.
• The Lounge – A chat interface hosted on a computer system.

The Opera team has created a user guide to get users started with Opera Unite. Opera Unite is available as a separate preview release which can be downloaded for all supported operating systems from the Opera Labs website. The download will actually replace the current version of Opera 10 if the user decides to install it in the same installation directory.

Opera Unite is then available in the left panel after installation. Starting the actual home server requires an Opera account. A homeaddress is assigned to every user signing up for Opera Unite in the from “http://computername.username.operaunite.com/” with the user selecting the computer name. The username will be the Opera username.

Once that has been setup the service that has been selected by the user gets setup. Setup of the file sharing module for example requires the selection of a directory on the local computer that will be used for that purpose. Each service that has been activated can then be accessed from the created homepage if the user accessing it has sufficient rights to do so.

The file sharing page on the server is for example protected by a password by default which can be changed in the root home directory. It offers three different access rights which make it possible to allow public access (everyone can access them), private access (only the root user can access the files) or password protected access.

Verdict:

Opera Unite offers something that web browsers do not offer out of the box. The usefulness of the service on the other hand depends largely on the user’s system configuration. If the user runs an home server then it might not be needed to run Opera Unite as well. Users who prefer to access everything from one program might find Opera Unite helpful especially if the developers and users begin to add new modules to the service. Not really a reinvention of the Internet but a nice service nevertheless.

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Home Web Server makes it possible to run websites on the local computer system. The web server supports a wide variety of options including php, cgi and isapi support next to SSL connections and private member directories. Not everything is preinstalled on the other hand. It is for example necessary to download PHP compiler from the official PHP website to add PHP support.

Basic HTML websites are on the other hand available by default. The root of the web server can be accessed locally by opening http://127.0.0.1/ in the web browser if the connection is established from the local computer. Users from the local network or remote networks need to use the local or Internet IP to connect to the web server.

Many aspects of the web server can be configured in the options including connection limits and timeouts, domain and root aliases, connection logging, supported mime types or redirects.

Home Web Server provides extensive options that should suite the needs of most users who want to install a web server on their computer. Alternatives are Quick PHP Web Server, XAMPP web server or the Portable Web Server.

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The web server can be downloaded in various configurations. The various configurations range from a bare-bone Apache web server to a web server supporting MySQL, SQLite, Pearl and PHP. The configuration only has an effect on the type of applications that can be run on the web server. Most users will probably need at least MySQL and PHP support to run their websites locally.

The web server can be started by double-clicking on the Server2Go.exe executable file in the root directory of the server. This will load the various web server modules and display a start page in the web browser. The pms_config.ini file can be used to change various settings of the web server including the default web browser, the port and whether the modules like MySQL or PHP should be started as well.

The actual files of a website are placed in the htdocs directory of the web server. Loading them can be as easy as pointing your browser to 127.0.0.1:4001 or some subdirectory of it depending on the type of site.

MySQL comes with phpMyAdmin which is accessible from the main interface of the web server. Server2Go offers an uncomplicated way to run a web server, it is especially helpful in environments where software installations are restricted.

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That’s not all however but it should give an example how easy it is to make files available online with HTTP File Server which was already reviewed about two years ago for the first time here at Ghacks. A lot has changed in the last two years.

The folders and files that get picked by the user are available immediately online. It’s probably a good idea to test the server locally and remotely before giving the remote IP to someone else. It might on the other hand not be necessary to hand out the remote IP if files should only be accessible by yourself.

The file server comes with a basic music player that can stream and play music directly without downloading the music first. Everything else is downloaded before it can be accessed.

Many possibilities to secure and restrict access can be configured in HTTP File Server. The system administrator can create user accounts and define files or folders that are restricted to those users. Additional possibilities include speed limits or restrictions by IP.

The file server supports real and virtual folders and can be configured to allow file uploads as well.

The main advantage of HTTP File Server is the ease of use and the portability of the application. The main site contains the latest release version of the server software, the forums provide access to the latest beta releases which provide additional functionality and bugfixes.

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This log files can become huge if you have a popular website. The current size of the Ghacks log file is 45 Gigabytes. If it continues growing in that pace the web server will run out of hard disk space pretty soon.

The first problem was to figure out how to backup the 45 Gigabyte file on the web server since I did not want to loose all the data stored within. The idea was born to compress the Apache web server log file first and then reduce it to a few Kilobytes with the echo command.

The Apache web server log files are stored in the /var/log/apache2 directory on the Debian dedicated server. The first command to issue would compress the contents of the apache2 directory into multiple tar files if the compressed file reaches a size maximum. This makes it easier to transfer files to another computer.

tar -cz directory | split -d -b 1024m - destination.tgz

Directory is the source directory where the Apache web server log files reside and destination.tgz is the name of the to be created compressed file. It is important to note that you might need to stop the Apache web server for the operation to succeed because the compression utility will stop if files get changed during procession.

The last thing that is to be done is to clear the original Apache web server log files in the log files directory. This can be done with the following command even if Apache is running.

echo " " > /var/log/apache2/filename.log

This simply overwrites the contents of the file. Please note again that some Linux distributions use another directory structure and that the log files can be located in another directory on the server.
This takes only a few seconds and the log file will be cleared from all contents afterwards.

Then it is just a matter of transferring the various compressed archives to another computer.

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I have detailed the process of installing and running a local Apache web server before but this method puts some strain on the system and is probably an overkill for a quick test run to see that the scripts are working correctly.

Quick PHP provides an answer. It is a standalone portable web server that does not require the installation of additional packages in its core version. The software creates a server that has a root directory that can be specified and a local port that has to be used to load the php scripts.

The core version can be extended to include PHP extensions for MySQL support with PHP.ini or can even be placed in the php installation folder that can be downloaded from the official php website.

Quick PHP is portable which makes it an ideal candidate for an USB Stick. The only requirements are an Internet Browser and either Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista.

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After outlining the main advantages of running a torrent client from a web server I would like to point out that there are also some disadvantages. If you happen to download “questionable” torrents they can be traced easily back to you. You rent the web server, you pay the bills and a simple whois can reveal your real name, address and phone number in a matter of seconds. The conclusion is that you can perfectly use it to distribute your own files (or share files with close friends) but should not consider downloading copyrighted files with it.

Back to the client that I’m going to introduce now. It is called Torrentflux and requires a *nix system, PHP, MySQL and Python 2.2 or higher. A version for Windows is also available for those who run a Windows server.

Torrentflux has many options that can be compared to the options of popular clients such as uTorrent or Azureus.

• Upload Torrents via URL or File Upload
• Start, Stop, and Delete Torrents with a click
• Advanced Torrent start options (ports, speeds, etc.)
• Multi-user interface
• RSS Feeds, download Torrents files with a click
• View Download Progress of all torrents at a glance
• View drive space at a glance
• View Torrent file meta information
• Built-in User management and Security
• Private Messaging
• Themes (selectable per user)
• Upload History
• Detailed User Administration
• Admin Searchable Logs
• Advanced Torrent Search (many major sites included)
• Cookie support at the user level for private trackers
• Queue Manager
• Maketorrent — supports making torrents
• Language Support

Installation for Torrentflux does not take long, just follow the following easy steps:

Unpack the files from the archive. Use tar -zxvf torrentflux.tar.gz if you the files are already on your web server or tools like Winrar or Winzip to unpack them in Windows.
Create a new database on your server. The easiest way to do this is use MySQLAdmin to create the new database and the new user who has access to it.
Import the SQL file named mysql_torrentflux.sql into the new database
Edit the file config.php with the values for the new database. (Username, Password, Host and name of database)
Upload the contents of the HTML folder to your web server. Create a new directory that is read and writeable. Chmod it to 777 if necessary.
The first time you run the torrent client you are asked to define a username and password for the super admin. Make sure you remember that.
Add the directory created under 5 to the path that is showing up at first startup. Make sure all settings have a green light next to them. If that is the case everything should be working fine. If not you have to fix this before you can continue.

That is it. You successfully installed the bittorrent client on your web server.

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Download Xampp for Windows and install it on your system. It does not matter if you install the modules as services, you can activate them as well by opening the control panel. (start apache) Once installed the webserver should be accessible by typing in http://localhost or http://yourdynamicip; You can look up your dynamic ip using my ip lookup script. Hosting files is as easy, just upload all the files that you want to share into the subfolder htdocs or create a subfolder and add the files to it.

Access the subfolder by appending /subfolder/ to the url that you want to access. You can add html and php files as well and those can be accessed as well similar to those files on other websites. It is easy to secure folders or the complete server using so called .htaccess files. Use the htaccess generator and add the generated files to your directories that you want to protect.

There is one last thing that can be optimized. It is difficulty for others to access your webserver if you have dynamic IPs. To counter this you could use a free service like DynDNS which adds a static dns to your IP. Friends and everyone else who should access the webserver can then use the dynamic dns which looks something like subdomain.dyndns.bz instead of the dynamic IP address.

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