Jonathan Thorsvik wrote:
> Hi, I currently have a Win98SE machine hosting a website like thing
> (HTML based database GUI) on my LAN. My LAN network is currently not
> connected to the internet so it is just for local users. I have heard
> that Linux is much better then Windows for web hosts so I would like
> to switch my web host over to linux. Currently the web host is
> running Apache with PHP/MySQL. For now that is good but when I setup
> the linux host I would like to put the MySQL server on a second
> machine. The web host does not see a high volume of users maybe 5~10
> at the most, and all are on the 100M/bit LAN. I have downloaded all
> the Suse 8.2 files to one of the machines on the network and shared
> them so all the other users can view them: \\JONATHAN\SUSE8\ (yes
> thats my computer). Once I have backed up all the files from the
> current web host to my pc how would I go about setting up Linux? I
> also have the Suse 8.2 live-eval iso image
> (SuSE-8.2-LiveEval-i386-Int-RC2.iso) on my harddisk and on cd if its
> neaded. I have no clue how to get this going... :-( Any help would
> be great. Maybe a HowTo or Guide What ever is available. Thanx for
> taking the time to read this. :-)
>

You can download/install the RPMS or build the entire thing from
scratch. Either process isn't overly difficult, and there's plenty of
documentation online on how to do both.

Your hardware should be sufficient for 5-10 users as long as it's simple
web pages with not much dynamic content or script processing. The
hardware is a little light, but you're utilizing one of the primary
advantages of Linux; pressing retired Windows hardware back into useful
service. Since it's a server project, I'd consider not installing the
GUI, although that'll make administration a little harder.

One thing you'll want to check however is your HTML based database GUI.
If it's a Microsoft product, you'll have to export the data and them
import it into MySQL. MySQL supports ODBC connections, but I haven't
seen too much out there that'll read Microsoft's databases aside from
MSSQL via Sybase connections.