[RESOLVED] Windows Server 2003

[TURKINATOR]

Ok guys, I got Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 EE. and have installed IIS6 and POP3.

I was wondering is there any good references or tutorials or even books on creating your own email server and web server and using the greater features in the admin tools.

My goal is to start hosting websites and setting up email services for businesses and for myself. Do you think it is a waste of time for me or is it possible for such?

[Hack]

What kind of a machine do you have?

If you are going to be hosting web sites, you had better have some pretty serious hard disk space available.

How much RAM do you have?

[TURKINATOR]

It is a P4 1.6 GHz, 256 RAM and 20G HDD.

[Slaine]

Hmm you might want to rethink your hardware requirements.

That is way too little RAM, and that hard drive is designed only for the OS - you will need much more (probably external) storage.

[TURKINATOR]

So not too good for using it then. I will just test it and get grips with server2003.

How do I go about creating email accounts and using them and also hosting my own website only.

I know my ISP has to allow me first and to have a static IP, another problem is my router doesnt have loopback. I can get my site showing on the intranet but not sure if its on the internet. I have so many more questions about it so I dont want to blog the forum. Any good references, books for Server 2003 and using all of its features? I really would like to master it.

[superbovine]

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx is the a pretty good resource.

There are a lot books on the topic.

Hardware:
Your hardware and ram requirements won't be enough to support POP3 and e-mail. You need about 1 gb min - 2 gb recommend.

I would recommend you have a multiple hard drives hold you e-mail, swap file, and active directory if you have one. In a perfect world you would have a couple raid arrays.

You want about 60 gb for your windows partition then decide how big your other parition are going to be. remember you need multiple disk.

Someone is going to come behind me and say if your server doesn't have much usage then you don't need it, and I would agree. Then again do you want your server going as slow as...

Loopback and your router have nothing to do with each other. If you setup your LAN correctly you server would have a local private ip address, and your router would have a public ip address which would translate and send your packets to your server. This in turn would allow client computers on the lan to connect to your server on it's private address.

if your only computer is the 2003 server and you cannot connect to 127.0.0.1 something is wrong in your config.

localhost never leaves your network card, and doesn't even hit the router.

the most important thing you need to learn to use is ntbackup if you are going to run production on this box.

[KMDcomp]

I'm not sure how much networking knowledge you have, so please don't be offended if this is below your level.

You need to set up your router to forward ports to your server. For instance, for websites, you would tell your router that any incoming connections that are using port 80 go to 192.168.1.4 if that is the IP address of your server. It's called port forwarding in most home routers. Pinholes and static routes are other terms that are used in routers.

One problem that I've encountered with companies that host their own email servers is blacklists. Basically, this can be a major headache that will prevent your customers from being able to send emails to places like AOL, many universities, and many other ISP's. You can deal with this by using your ISP's SMTP server to send the emails; it's easy to set up in exchange. You will have to check with your ISP to see how they feel about routing lots of emails through one account name. My company doesn't have a problem with it, and we send over 1k emails per month.

These are just some things to think about. I've known several people who have tried to do what you are doing, with various levels of success.

[TURKINATOR]

Thanks for the reply. No offence taken, anything at the moment is a gain. My networking isn't all the best I can say that for sure but I have a little knowledge.

Server 2003 is very new to me and I really would like to explore it. I had tried using Windows XP Pro with IIS5.1 to host my own website and I also had port 80 forwarding to the LAN IP. I tried all sorts of things and eventually gave up. I assumed that my ISP didn't allow port 80 forwarded and also my ISP IP is Dynamic. I even changed the port that it was on from default 80 to 99. 192.168.1.x:99, Same result. My router doesnt loop back so testing it much of an option.

I guess I need to upgrade my router and change my ISP that provides me a Static IP to make life easier.

Any suggestions or recommendations?

[KMDcomp]

Have you tried plugging one of your computers into the WAN side of your router and verifying that it is correctly forwarding port 80?

[TURKINATOR]

I have got the server working on port 80. Everyting is working great, Thanks for everyones help in this