I’ve spent the last two weeks working on getting [[Oracle]] into the role she was designed to play…but have found it to be a bit more involved than I realized.

Originally, I set up the server to be a web server with php and sql capabilities. Then I realized I needed to FTP files to the web server, so I installed FileZilla Server. Once that was done, I started working on the webpage for tsnlocal.net. I got it up, and then wanted to play around with some other type of server, and decided on a Jabber server for instant messaging. I installed Wildfire.

Wildfire is extremely easy to setup and install – so once I finished that, I looked for a Jabber client. My first choice was a VoIP client called Jabbin, but I couldn’t get it to connect to the server – probably because I don’t have a VoIP Protocol on the server to support it. So I went with what we use at work, Exodus. It’s a fairly functional Jabber client – with chat rooms, IM rosters, subscriptions, and file transfer…and a bunch of other stuff, including plugins.

Once the Jabber service was set up, and I figured out how to connect to it, I realized that telling people to use my dyndns domain name was not going to work. So I had to figure out how to get my Godaddy.com domain name to link directly to my IP address. But, come to find out, I have to have a Top Level Domain for an IP address, or my dyndns must be a nameserver registered with the NS Registry, in order to use it as a nameserver. I spent 2 days setting up BIND on Windows XP (because there was very little help on the internet for how to do it). Then I jacked around with the Total DNS control settings on godaddy, and got the webserver to work like it should – almost.

So now you can join the jabber server with yourname@jabber.tsnlocal.net. Now that I had that working, I noticed that there were email settings like pop.tsnlocal.net and smtp.tsnlocal.net that could be set up, so I decided to look into running my own email server. I got in #bloodshotgamer on irc.gamesurge.net and asked some of the tecky people I talk to in there what they’d recommend. Duck-Lap recommended qmail for linux, but mentined MailEnable for Windows. I was hoping for an IMAP service so I could run the webpage side of it, but that was not included with this. I might upgrade the service to something new later on, but for now, this was easy to install, and has easy administration, which is what I’m looking for since most of these other services aren’t critical to the function of the server. BIND was about the only thing that was hell to configure…everything else was easily figured out once I had the info and a general grasp of what it does and how it does it.

So now, [[Oracle]] does these things:
- Web Server (Apache, PHP, MySQL)
- FTP Server
- DNS Server
- Email Server
- Jabber Server
- TeamSpeak Voicechat Server
- Hamachi server
- Google Desktop distributed indexing server for the hamachi shares (the essence of tsnlocal)
- and a keep-alive for the dyndns service linking my IP to the dynamic domain

That’s a lot for a little box…but I’m not done yet – I need to put ssh on it so I can telnet into it. I’m sure there are other things that I will find to do with it as time goes on too.

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