The best updated Tutorial for a web server?

[pinoguin]

Hi,

I've seen plenty of tutorials and some of them are outdated. Does anyone here use a full-tutorial for creating a web server?

[gilinko]

The best tutorial is to read the documentation for the webserver(for apache: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/). Any tutorial will quickly become outdated as the webserver technlogies are moving rather quickly as a whole.

For hooking other services into the webserver(mod_perl, mod_cgi, mod_php etc) the best documentation is on the websites that host these projects.

[pinoguin]

Thank you. But I was looking for a tutorial that will build everything:
- apache
- mysql
- mail

I only found one: http://www.freebsdmadeeasy.com/ , is this good?

Can anyone please recommend another?

[gilinko]

As these are not interconnected at all(in 99.999% of cases) I would suggest the following, and a strong suggestion would be to install it from the ports:

Mysql:
If you use ports to install, you can skip ahead to securing/configuring your installation. The Mysql reference manual has tonnes of information on every part of this http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/index.html

Apache:
Again build from ports, all you need to do is the configuration and that's again covered very well with the online apache documentation with several user cases(the middle column) http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/

Mail:
if you are new to running an email server I would suggest postfix and it's documentation here http://www.postfix.org/documentation.html and as a mail client for pop3/imap dovecot and it's well documented wiki http://wiki.dovecot.org/

The big benefit from using ports is that experienced people have already done the hard part in patching and initial configuration, all you have to do is to tweak it to work how you want it.

A "good" complete free turorial that you are asking for does not exist. It's like going to you car dealer and asking for information which is the best car, best airplane and how to cook your sunday brunch. The non-free tutorial is called paid-support from a company ;). However with this forum and many more you can ask questions when you do get into trouble.

[pinoguin]

What I did was go to something like /usr/ports/databases/mysql51-server

Then do "make install" , is this the ports method?

[gilinko]

Yes. You might want to read up in the freebsd handbook about using ports before going to far into installing software. http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports-using.html

Also I would recommend the 5.0 server as the 5.1 is still a bit unstable

[pinoguin]

Is there some kind of ready-to-use script for an email server? I've tried setting one up numerous times but without success :(