no idea how a web server works

mickal

With a permanent broadband connection can you host a website on your home computer ? Is this in anyway connected to products like spinneret ? How do these things work ?

confused

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

mikal wrote:

With a permanent broadband connection can you host a website on your home computer ?

It depends on your ISP, the services they provide, and the things allowed in your TOS agreement. Typically, the TOS for home users precludes running a server that's available from the internet. But that's not to say it can't be done anyway. From a technical standpoint, most home internet connections use a dynamic IP address that can change over time -- typically during power failures, when the modem is turned off, or the ISP does some kind of servicing/configuration work at their end. This makes it difficult to provide a workable address to those who might want to access your server. Fortunately, there are "DNS" services available that can assign you a named URL that will point people to your changing IP address. On such service is

http://dyndns.com

and it's free.

Once that's done, you need to "poke a hole" through your firewall to allow incoming requests and to set up your router to direct those requests to the box/board that hosts your server.

Is this in anyway connected to products like spinneret ? How do these things work ?

Yes, absolutely, there's a connection, since the Spinneret can operate as a web server. The "how" part is beyond the scope of a forum response, though. I would suggest reading the Spinneret documentation, along with the stickies in the Spinneret forum to get started. Then, when you have a specific question, post it there for additional help.

-Phil

SRLM

It's surprisingly easy to set up a web server on your computer. If you download something like Tomcat or Apache you can have a http web server running almost out of the box. If you're looking for something a little more esoteric then you can start a database server or ssh server almost as easily. The hardest part for first timers, I think, is trying to actually access the server from the internet instead of just from the LAN.

tonyp12

If you want your Computer to be a basic webserver, IIS is already built in
http://digitizor.com/2009/02/20/how-to-install-microsoft-iis-server-on-windows-7/

To reach it from the internet involves to get your IP address (could change sporatic)
Change your router to port 80 to local IP that your computer is on,
could also change unless set as static ip.