Turn Your Home Computer into a Web Server in 2 Minutes

Opera Unite is very alpha with security best described as… will be there in future. Shouldn’t go anywhere near important files.

wow, that is an amazing piece of technology. Somehow I have this feeling this might be the next bittorrent.

Any ideas if it can be configured when we are behind a router ?

There is a much easier solution, I guess this is more suited for the advanced user try HFS at rejetto.com/hfs/

Update on HFS: You can use HFS (HTTP File Server) to send and receive files. It’s different from classic file sharing because it uses web technology to be more compatible with today’s Internet. It also differs from classic web servers because it’s very easy to use and runs “right out-of-the box”. You can access your remote files, over the network and HFS has been successfully tested with Wine under Linux.

Very interesting topic. But how do i access my home web server from outside? Do opera wil give us like a public domain?

@getvideo
yes opera gives you a unique public domain, and it doesn’t even matter if u have a static or a dynamic ip address.

Its good but my only worry is its vulnerability to malicious virus attacks.

“Any ideas if it can be configured when we are behind a router ?” – Yes, if a direct connection fails for some reason it will fall back to opera proxy servers.

“Very interesting topic. But how do i access my home web server from outside? Do opera wil give us like a public domain?” – You setup a myopera account and when you share something they give you dynamic DNS resolution. The final url is something like ..operaunite.com

Of course if you have your own domain and UPnP support in your router in theory you don’t need anything from the opera domain.

I gotta tell ya, at first I thought you were going to explain some easier way of getting apache up and running. The whole Opera Unite thing threw me for a loop. What Opera has done with its Unite is truly innovative. Thanks for the blog post.

IIS comes with windows and can be installed in probably less than 2 min, or configured to install with the operatating system itself. Apache is relatively quick too. From then, you could be doing this same thing after less than probably 10 or 15 min of asking google, bing or whatever. While doing this will take more than 2 min, you will learn something, namely “the right way to host a website” and you won’t have to download a crappy browser to get it done. The “quick and easy route” is often the wrong one. If they said, “you too can fly a plane without learning how in just 2 min and all you have to do is get this free ‘open source’ plane that probably is used by like 15% of other ‘flyers’”, do you think that would be a good idea?

I guess you don’t use tabbed browsing, pop-up blockers, integrated search bars, speed dial or a RAM cache either. Yea, those Opera guys never have a good idea. Theres the wrong way and the right way to do things, and the right way involves foregoing innovation and doing things the hard way…you know, like they did it 10 years ago. In fact, forget using a graphical interface and a mouse, if you’re not programming your computer in machine code you’re just taking the “quick and easy” way out.

oh, and “crappy browser?” Really? What a…

“Hey you kids, get off my lawn!”

The opera unite services are implemented pretty well given the fact that they are in alpha, But it really is not useful for majority of the people using the internet.

To get a good idea of the Opera Unite see the discussion here link

Doing this is not a good idea for the electrical grid. Much better for a few hundred servers to serve this type of content than a million home computers forced to idle 24×7 to make a few MegaBytes each, accessible.

Browser bloat. It used to be that every application bloated until it was an email client. Now the new goal is for every application to include a web server. This is just another way for attackers to gain access to your computer.

If you want to serve web pages, install a web server or use a hosting service.

Nice app and good file sharing concept. This gave me the idea of setting up this same thing using apache/https/dyndns and user authentication with htaccess :)

Next step: wait for

(1) Email from your family complaining about the really slow throughput from your server because your ISP gives you an upload rate far slower than your download rate, and

(2) your ISP to cut you off because your Terms of Service prohibit running a server from your home.

Those of you who have decent upload rates and whose ISPs are reasonable… I’m jealous.

Wow that’s really great, yes it is a bit of bloat in the browser – until you actually run it and realize that it loads up faster than any other browser, and is so much more lightweight than all the competitors even with the bloatware.

@zac
I understand what you are saying. Yes there are inovations in web browsing that were not introduced by IE. I love tabbed browsing, which IE stole, pop up blockers are ok, but annoying if you surf responsibly in the firs place in the sense that even if you hit a site that does, it wasn’t something that was going to f$$%^& your computer, i can close an add (btw I do use that ’stolen’ feature in IE, I just hate it). But comparing the ‘right way and wrong way’ to do things to 10 years ago? Please? the ‘right way’ is 10 times easier than it was back then regardless of who thought of it first, and the fact is that the ‘right way’ does not involve ‘programming your computer in machine code’. In fact several innovations that you may have missed I guess have made this much easier, which brings me back to my first point, this is easy enough already without making it ‘2 clicks of a mouse’ easy, and complicated enough that you should probably know a bit about what you are doing before you do it… that’s all I’m trying to say. And as for ‘crappy browser’ as I stated earlier, I was using a tone with that statement that was unecessary. Opera is a fine browser, however, why bother, now that IE has ’stolen’ all the basic technology, just use what most of the rest of the world is using is what I would think….
“hey, you people stuck in the past get off my lawn already…”

Hey dude, thats surely something wonderful… I would love to have my own system as a webserver. The only problem,that seems to arrive is my slow internet connection. For this, we would need a fast internet connection. :)

This one of thing I was looking for but besides this how do I can share my screen? I mean I want to my friend have full access to my screen so he can help me on work. It will be great if I can do that by Yahoo messenger or AIM or Live messenger.