Hi all First, thanks for not being offended by my comments Pete. It's so refreshing to be able to discuss such things (and to refer to other peoples comments) without people people being offended (something which doesn't always happen, as I found out when I commented on a few things on the mozilla firefox forums).
Secondly I too would like to allow access from the Internet to my web server, at some time in the future, but I really don't have a clue as to how to go about it. I allowed Internet access to the server, via my firewall, and asked a few select friends to try and view my web pages a few times, giving them my ip address, but so far no one has been able to access my web server. Is there something I am missing here? Do I need to sign up to one of those dynamic ip web sites. I don't have a domain name and to be honest, I don't think I really need one until I am more proficient at secure PHP coding. I have been able to configure another computer on my network to be able to access my web server (on my main computer) both using microcrap O/S's, but I have been told to use a linux box if I want to allow Internet connections because it is much more secure than MS Bindoze. Is this true? I have another machine which I could set up with linux, but it only has about 256 megs of ram and an 80 gig HD. Is this sufficient for older version of linux and are older versions of linux as secure as modern ones? I also read somewhere that it is good practice to have the db on a different computer, both because of security and also because if the db becomes too big, it's much faster. Again, is this correct?
