How to Set Up a First Home Linux Server?

More general (home) server concepts.

• Ubuntu server download (9.04 server edition features)
• Ubuntu server setup documentation (7.10, 8.04, but that is fine) and FAQ
  • Also general documentation and Server Guide for 9.04
• Ubuntu home server setup steps
• HowToForge: The Perfect Server - Ubuntu Hardy Heron (is about 8.04, should not matter)
• other interesting reads,
  • blog post on a user experience (has some other ubuntu article references)
• while this general question was moved to SU, you can lookup specifics at SF
  • like, setting up remote access and logs that you should monitor
• Since you are new to unix/linux environments, the UbuntuGeek site is a good reference
• Bonus: Chapter 5. The Ubuntu Server from The Official Ubuntu Book, 3rd Edition
  • What Is Ubuntu Server?
  • Installing Ubuntu Server
  • Ubuntu Package Management
  • Ubuntu Server Security

Since you seem to have a single static IP address from your ISP for setting up this server, DNS may be more about configuring your web domain and server name properly. Even that might be solved by your ISP.

Things get more interesting if you intend to have a small network along with the server.
You then need to protect the network from a potential server compromise too.

Here are a few references for DNS,

• Linux DNS Server (this is a good read for general concepts)
• DNS Setup & Configuration in Unix
• also check this short quick-read on How to Set Up a Server

I'd recommend choosing a Turnkey Linux appliance. These use Ubuntu Server and are pre-configured to run various applications/servers and are set up to be pretty secure and efficient.

You can run them in a virtual machine or on a physical computer either by installing or just running straight from the CD. The download is much smaller (~150mb) than a full Ubuntu CD too.

They have a nice web-based configuration interface to configure most things, but you can always drop into a shell if and when you need to.

They're a good way to get going quickly and once you learn your way around, you can graduate to building your own server from scratch.

first make a choice on what distro you want to use; then search on google.com/linux for that distro's name + LAMP (linux apache mysql php)

before installing it to a real machine, play a few days with that on a vmware guest machine

I would suggest debian, for starters

well; I use ubuntu as server. Static IP is solved by dyndns.org For ftp; proftpd; real simple to use, it even has good gui. For torrents; i've installed wine + utorrents (special partition for downloading stuff, so I always have room at main partition). vnc and ssh for remote deskop and control. I also have few webpages put; just few things for my friends; for that I used apache server; (off all the programs I've mentioned this is only one that needs to be configured without gui).