By afrofish on

Hi everyone,

I am planning to build an intranet service for my company and wanted to use a CMS service to ensure it is as flexible as possible (and easy to update). I work for a small company (approx 20 PCs) and the budget for this project is non existent (as it is not seen as a priority) but I am hoping that will not be an obstacle thanks to open source software.

To cut a long story short I am hoping to set-up the intranet on a server consisting of an old desktop machine which is no longer used. My initial plan is to install CentOS (free linus distro intended for servers) onto the machine followed by Xampp (to provide MySQL, PHP and Perl with minimal headaches) and finally to install Drupal.

My understanding is that I can then assign the computer an IP address and if I then make the homepage equal to the IP address on the user's computer they will have access to the site I set up...

I have created HTML and CSS sites in the past but a CMS system is something totally new to me. In addition I have built machines but always based on Windows architecture. My networking knowledge is also very flaky based on a fairly basic home network of three PCs and laptops.

In short am I biting off more than I can chew? Is my outline above feasible or have I misunderstood how the various components work?

Apologies for so many questions but I don't want to waste valuable time trying to do something which is fundamentally flawed. Equally if I get the thumbs up I will have the encouragement I need to persevere knowing it can be made to work.

Thanks in advance,

John

Comments

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

General I think you are on the right track, though I would suggest given the web site a domain name so people do not need to recall can IP.

mradcliffe’s picture

mradcliffe
he/him
Primary language English
commented

If it's just an intranet site, then you should be able to use the hostname of the machine as long as you have a local DNS.

I just googled Centos yum apache and got this link here: http://www.techiecorner.com/125/how-to-install-lamp-apache-php-and-mysql...

You'll then probably need to edit /etc/httpd/httpd.conf or wherever it is on a CentOS system.

I'd probably also install subversion so you can keep version control if you want to separate your dev. site from your live site

afrofish’s picture

afrofish commented

Thankyou for getting back to me guys,

I think you may be right nevets about assigning a domain name. I was thinking of setting the homepage to the IP address but I was failing to take into account people who always use the address bar and not the home button. mradcliffe's suggestion of using the Computer name might be nice and easy as I could just call it 'intranet' but I think the worst problems will already be overcome by that point. Also thanks for the techiecorner link, looks excellent..

I'll let you all know how I get on, thanks again,

John