[Melbourne-pm] apache and perl and

Craig Sanders cas at taz.net.au
Sun Aug 24 15:13:29 PDT 2008


On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 05:27:25PM +1000, Ben Hare wrote:
> is it necessary to work on your own pc? cos if not, you really are
> going about this the hard way. if you don't have an environment at
> work, how about a cheap web host? you'd have your hello world script
> up and running in a few seconds most likely with the help of docs
> telling you exactly how to get your cgis working.

another similar option would be to get an old PC and install linux on
it. pretty much any old computer will do, even an ancient pentium with
64MB RAM and a network card will do for a lightly load home/experimental
web server (that spec used to be considered adequate for real web sites
out on the internet 10+ years ago....but, of course, the newer & faster
& bigger, the better).

run ubuntu or debian linux on it (debian's probably easier to have a
minimal install without graphical desktop, which is what you want for
a server, especially on ancient hardware). the system doesn't need a
screen or keyboard or even a CD-ROM except for the initial install - as
soon as it's running, it doesn't need them any more.

after the base install you'd need apache, perl, various perl modules,
and optionally samba (to provide file sharing from the linux server to
your windows machine).

then you would either:

1. install putty.exe onto your windows box to give you an ssh client so
you login and get a command-line shell on the linux box from the windows
machine. then use nano or some other simple editor to edit your perl
scripts.

2. install and configure samba on the linux box so that your apache
DocumentRoot *AND* your cgi-bin directory appeared as network shares
on your windows box - you could then edit the files on windows using
Notepad++ or whatever and just save them directly to those shares.


it may seem like more work to get this running, but it's probably no
more work than stuffing around with apache + perl on windows.  Both
of these things just work "out of the box" on linux because that is
the environment they were designed for.

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>


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