Random Bits of Life

A few weeks ago I got a somewhat older computer from a friend of mine who didn’t want it because the hard drive was all messed up. I managed to fix the hard drive, get it up and running again, and then decided to turn it into a file server. I found an awesome tutorial online and began following it, setting up Xubuntu, installing various packages, and getting a LAN connection configured between my main computer and the new one.

I should also mention that up until this point, I hadn’t really done anything with Linux, except for using the Ubuntu Live CD to make a FAT32 partition larger than 2GB on a hard drive of mine. The tutorial really got me interested in using Linux, and after a while I found another great resource for learning about the Command Line Interface, BASH scripting, and the terminal in general.

But back to the file server. After figuring out how to route an internet connection through my main PC to the linux box through a switch, I was on to installing various things like an FTP server, file sharing, and even a full fledged LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) setup. The tutorial walks you through everything, and makes it very easy to understand what you’re doing. Every single terminal command used is shown to you, and there are many images you can look at for reference to make sure you’re doing things correctly. So at this point, I now have a fully functional file server, that I’m able to SSH tunnel into, and use VNC with. After I i out how to set up port forwarding with my router, I’ll be able to access the server from anywhere with an internet connection. Never again will I be thinking, “Man, I wish I could access my computer right now”.