1. Overview

Have you ever wanted to play around with running your own web server or just wanted to connect to your home machine from work or school. It's not as difficult as it may sound. The method described here works best with an "always on" connection such as DSL or cable modem, but can still work with a typical dial-up connection.

The problem with setting up your home machine as a server is that your internet address changes regularly with most broadband connections, and changes every time when you dial-up. You'll see how to get around this below.

2. Getting Your Own Personal Domain

NOTE: If you just want to get your computer serving on the internet, but don't want to spend the money to buy your own domain name, you can skip this section.

3. Connecting Your Domain Name to Your Home Computer

This is the real meat of this project. There is a great service at http://www.dyndns.org that does this for you. If you purchased a domain name, you'll have to make a one time donation of at least $30 in order to use their service. This is a very good deal. This service is called Custom DNS under the MyDynDNS section. If you haven't purchased a domain name, you should look at the Dynamic DNS section.

They have pretty good documentation on their site on how to set up each type of service. The Dynamic DNS section is very easy. All you have to do is pick one of their domain names to live under and enter your current IP address through their web interface or use one of their client programs to do it for you. The Custom DNS method is a little more complex.

For Custom DNS, you have to tell NamesDirect that DynDNS will be handling your domain name. You can do this right on the NamesDirect home page (if you followed the steps in the previous section). Go to the "manage your domain" section then to the "manage your DNS" section. You'll have to set your nameservers to ns1.mydyndns.org, ns2.mydyndns.org, and ns3.mydyndns.org. Make sure that you do not put any other names than these.

Now that DynDNS is handling your domain name, you should go into the DynDNS Members NIC and set the IP address to the current IP address of your computer. You can also use one of the client programs distributed on the DynDNS web site to do this. There is an advanced configuration section and a basic configuration section. You can switch between the two whenever you want, but you'll probably want to start with the basic section unless you really know what you are doing.

4. Conclusion

With very little time and expense, you can have a very professional domain setup. Combine this setup with virtual domains in the Apache web server and various other internet server software and you'll really impress your friends.