Notes on setting up TWiki on a LAN

I am going to try set up a TWiki on my home LAN.   I plan to record here what I did, as I did it.

Purpose of this page

1. To keep a record for me.
2. To possibly help others do the same thing

Initial Setup

• Earthlink Cable Broadband, delivered by Time-Warner
    Note:  ADSL is not available yet; so I can't use HAL-PC, my preferred ISP. 
• Cable Modem connects to an SMC Barricade Broadband Router, 7008BR
• The Barricade serves DHCP in a private Class C subnet
• There are 4 permanent machines connected:  3 MS Windows, & 1 Linux "Plato"
  • All 4 have permanent IP's served them by the Barricade through "MAC Address Control" Fixed Mapping
• There is 1 semi-permanent Linux box
• Plato is running Red Hat Linux release 8.0 (Psyche)
• Plato is "headless" (no monitor, keyboard, or mouse)
• Plato has a home grown (iptables) firewall that allows outside access only from Steve's & HAL-PC
• The Barricade already sends ports 22 & 113 to Plato
    113 to "stealth" it (see GRC Gibson Research Corp.)

How things work now

• Our external IP is "semi-static" -- i.e. it changes only occasionally
• I administer Plato by PuTTY (in MS Windows) or ssh (in Linux); from the LAN, Steve's, or HAL-PC
• When I try to browse my IP I get:
  • "Could not connect to remote server" working from inside the LAN
  • a time out, working from outside the LAN
• We can share our 1 connected printer

Major Steps (To Do)

Send port 80 to Plato
Activate Apache
Install TWiki

Send port 80 to Plato (easy)

Sending port 80 (Web Server) to Plato is almost trivial:

1. Log on to the Barricade
2. Select "Virtual Server"
3. In the next unused line:
   • Enter "80" in the "Service Ports" column
   • Enter Plato's LAN IP in the "Server IP" column
   • Check the box in the "Enable" column
4. At the bottom of the page, click "Save"
5. Reboot the Barricade
6. Verify the changes
7. (Fix / Re-do if necessary)

Activate Apache

Fortunately, Plato has Apache installed already so one-time activation is really easy:

    [root@plato root]#  service httpd start

Later we can worry about changing scripts to make  httpd   come up at boot.
For now let's see if anything changed.  So: 

1. Browsed my IP (external) from my regular machine:  Success -- Apache Test Page
2. Browsed my IP from Steve's (via PuTTY & Lynx):  Success -- Apache Test Page

Install TWiki

  -- RickArchibald - 03 Nov 2003

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