I always try to find affordable solutions for the nonprofit organizations I work with. I started this project to help the Children's Ministry of a Church but as the ideas started to pop up I realized how easy it is to have a reliable and economical solutions to manage the needs of both big and small organizations.
Today I will describe on part one of the project how to setup your portable server. Of course you can choose different hardware and software but I hope you will have a good idea on how to deploy a great solution that can solve many problems and improve the quality of service of your nonprofit.
This article was written for the absolute beginner and is not meant to be a detailed technical tutorial for geeks. I just want to explain you how to do things in plain English.

I started by purchasing an Acer Aspire ONE laptop http://www.acer.com/aspireone/ I was looking for the cheapest version wish is an 8GB solid state drive but since they where sold out I got the Windows XP model with a 160 GB hard drive. They are pretty amazing machines and cost only about $350 USD.
My first step was to get rid of Windows and install Linux Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.0.4.1 and I just followed the instructions on the Ubuntu Website at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne
Because the instructions are meant for the cheapest Acer I had to tweak things when it came to the part of enabling the WiFi. The rest is pretty staright forward and I took me about 2 hours to get everything running. If you are not used to Linux this can be a little bit challenging but it can be done. I already have another small Acer One with Windows XP installed and when I got to the end of the proccess I was simply amazed on how Ubuntu runs so much faster and smoothly. In order to have a machine as fast as the Acer Aspire One a few years ago we had to spend 10 times more, wow technology is getting cheaper!

Next we start the fun and we have to install a few things on Linux. I reccomend a software update before we do anything. You can just click the Menu and do an automatic update. Then open a Terminal window and you can just drag and drop these lines of code in that window, hit Enter and you will build your Apache Web Server on a sub-notebook. You will need to run the following commands:
sudo apt-get install apache2

sudo apt-get install php5

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Your web files will now be found in /var/www/ This means that you can put any web application on that folder and access it through the Network. This is now your private web server. After you will install a MySQL server. Again open a terminal window, and use the following commands:
sudo apt-get install mysql-server

sudo apt-get install php5-mysql

sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

You're almost done! You may need to get a new password to access your databases. So now run this command:
sudo mysqladmin -u root password your-new-password
Now you just need to verify if everything is working. So open a web browser an go to http://localhotst and you should see a page saying "It's Working!" this means that your Apache Server is running. You can also type http://localhost/phpmyadmin and this will give you access to the database administration. Great you now have a portable webserver. You could just put the machine on the basement and start hosting your own websites but we will learn how to install some applications to help your nonprofit organization. Try now to access the server from another computer. First you will need to know the IP address of your new server. On a terminal window type>
ifconfig
You should see an address simillar to 192.168.1.101 (this is just an example). When you go to another computer and type that address you should be able to open any website hosted on the /var/www/ folder of your new portable server. On the next article I will explain how can you create an awesome system to check in and out Children from a nursery or Children's Ministry using ID cards with barcodes.


Tony Silveira is a Canadian Web Developer dedicated to nonprofit and business solutions.
http://www.netgifted.com

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