Portable Webserver OS For Small Intranets

[nathan-sr]

Hi All,

I just completed creating a re-mastered pen drive image, with the XAMPP webserver, for helping the Web Developers, Testers, Learners and End Users.
It just requires a 8 GB OR More Good EMPTY Pen Drive, to restore this pen drive image, once and start using the webserver, to serve your webfiles, over the entire local area network, with an easy to use address ( i.e. https://ws.local/foldername ).

If necessary, this pen drive image can also be restored to a internal hard disk, for serving over larger intranets.

Project Location And Download Link : https://sourceforge.net/projects/portab ... -intranet/

Welcome your feedback on the same.

Some screenshots of the boot screen and its desktop below :

[williwaw]

just curious what puppy is remastered?
are there any additional tweaks or addititions?
thanks

[rockedge]

@nathan-sr Nice! I will be giving it a look over and try it out.

I also have several systems set up with XAMPP and also have several machines running installed web server and MySQL database that can switch between Hiawatha and Apache.

Somewhere on the old forum (murga forum) I posted instructions how to add Hiawatha to XAMPP to be able to switch on the fly which to use, Apache (default) or Hiawatha.

You could probably mix NGINX into an XAMPP installation as well with some fiddling.

[nathan-sr]

just curious what puppy is remastered?
are there any additional tweaks or addititions?
thanks

Yes, bionicpup64 is the base, from which I keep adding stuff, to serve different purposes.

Firstly, as you have seen in the screenshot, the icons & wallpaper were enhanced for aesthetic reasons.

Secondly, the GRUB2 / EFI boot loaders from the free multibootusb software were used, as opposed to the GRUB4DOS, as it gives readability of the pen drive on windows as well.

Thirdly, avahi-daemon was added to give it a easy host name resolution over the LAN ( Please checkout the rc.local & rc.shutdown files in it )

Fourthly, xampp 8.0.12 sfs was integrated ( thanks to the contribution of our forum members, whose efforts have been integrated )

Fifthly, the apache's & phpadmin's DocumentRoot location were changed to the root of the pen drive ( i.e. /initrd/mnt/dev_save area ), so that users can find it easily

Thanks @rockedge for the kind words. Yes, I noticed that in the forum search. The challenges that we face in the real world are many and that motivates us to keep bettering our work all the time. I just wanted to give my open source project users, a simple & portable webserver pen drive, so that they can drop in their files quickly and serve it over their LAN. That's all.

[rockedge]

@nathan-sr I like it! Easy to get up running and will run the latest PHP code and will be a solid LAN web server

[nathan-sr]

@nathan-sr Nice! I will be giving it a look over and try it out.

Hi @rockedge , Were you able to try it out ? Your feedback is very important to me. Thanks.
BTW, I have added some hints on restoring the image using RescueZilla, on the project page mentioned above, to make it easier for all. Hope it helps.

Appreciate your efforts put into all this.

Best Regards,

Nathan S.R.

[rockedge]

@nathan-sr I have been testing it out and it works!

I did have some difficulty installing it though using the format the distro comes in. This is produced by creating a backup using Rescuezilla or a clone?

Once it was working on a USB drive I tried it out on QEMU but have not found the right order of steps to get it installed and working without configuring the QEMU machine to have USB access to the host machine which proved to be tricky. Problem in QEMU is the Rescuezilla ISO needs to be booted as the virtual machine OS but is not outfitted with the tools to set things up easily.

Overall once it is going it works well and XAMPP provides a full featured web server. I think the system offered as a remastered ISO might make it easier to install in more types of situations

[nathan-sr]

Hi @rockedge, Yes the pen drive that I installed everything was imaged finally using Rescuezilla ( via VirtualBox ) and uploaded in zip format, to the project site mentioned above. Probably, instead of QEMU, VirtualBox ( along with its extension pack, which supports USB Drives ), is a lot easier to work with from the VM's settings.

Anyway, Glad that it worked well.

Best Regards,

Nathan S.R.

[nathan-sr]

Features & Limitations of this Portable Webserver OS :

1. Uses a FAT32 File System ( i.e With Pen Drive Base ) For Readability / Transferability of Files from most Operating Systems, thereby making it Portable / Plug & Play.

2. Designed for Serving Only a Few Static Webpages / Static DB Data over the LAN. Users are expected to have a backup of these files, on other devices / disks for Data Redundancy.

3. Text / Programming editors like geany are present for writing code in it.

4. It is Not Suitable for Dynamic / Transaction Oriented Web Applications, where Fault Tolerance is of Paramount Importance. For such Applications, it is better to have XAMPP installed on EXT4 like Filesystems, that too on internal hard drives.

Thanks & Credits to @rockedge for his efforts of Testing / Giving Feedback on this distribution.

[Jasper]

@nathan-sr

Could you self-host applications using this OS?

Found a small list here:
https://selfh.st/apps/

Also, I stumbled across 'Memcached' which sounds like something that could be utilised by your OS?
https://memcached.org/

I did compile it in Jammypup64 but forgot to add the 'enable proxy' options.

[nathan-sr]

@nathan-sr

Could you self-host applications using this OS?

Found a small list here:
https://selfh.st/apps/

Also, I stumbled across 'Memcached' which sounds like something that could be utilised by your OS?
https://memcached.org/

I did compile it in Jammypup64 but forgot to add the 'enable proxy' options.

@Jasper ,

As Memcached is for dynamic applications ( as your link states ), it would be better to enable Apache's own internal caching mechanisms, for static webpage servers like this portable web server os. Here is the link to its caching documentation : https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/caching.html

After setting up caching, add your static websites, one by one and note the performance on your Local Area Network ( LAN only )

Also keep clones of your pen drive, through the RescueZilla software for safety purposes.

Hope this helps.

[rockedge]

why not use the Hiawatha web server already built into Puppy Linux? Hiawatha is one of the securest and fastest web servers available. It scales very well from being a very small web server to a very large web server with heavy loads.
To start and stop Hiawatha web server, in a terminal:

Code: Select all

hiawatha
killall hiawatha

Hiawatha is light weight and is easy to configure! The Hiawatha web server will meet your needs. Configuration files are in /etc/hiawatha
More on Hiawatha -> https://hiawatha.leisink.net/