[RLewis2]

Hi, I have installed RedHat having never used Linux before. it appears to have installed all the apache software OK and I can start and stop apache by using the relevant commands in a shell terminal. I am trying to place my own web pages on the server to be visible to the outside world, but when I type in the IP address of my computer (static IP address), nothing is visible. I am thinking that it might be something to do with the DNS configurations and I am wondering if it is possible to view a web page using just the IP address. I have not yet registered a domain name. I have also tried on the Linux machine typing in http://localhost as I read on another site that it is a good way to see if Apache is working, but it kept timing out. Any advice would be welcome and obviously I will at some point register a domain name and get a new connection not with my current ISP, but I just wanted to know how I could be sure everything was working. Any advice would be welcome. Thanks in advance.

[Squashman]

You may have enabled the firewall on Red Hat and it is blocking stuff from coming in but you should still be able to see your webpage by typing localhost on your server. Do you have your webpages in /var/www/html

Is your Linux box connected to a router that is doing nat translation to the internet.

[RLewis2]

Thanks very much for your help with this. It is working now. Only one problem - the /var/www/html directory, where I had put my index page, was write-protected, even for root. I went into the shell and changed the privileges for the whole /var/ tree, and this has thrown up a nasty error message when I boot the machine. Any idea what the permissions should be for the /var/ folder?

[Squashman]

root root 755