Hello good people of the oh-em-gee communitee! My name is Benjamin, otherwise known as humphreybc. For those of you who haven’t heard of me I’m a 19 year old kiwi Computer Science student studying in Dunedin, New Zealand. I like many things including (but not limited to) flying, photography, music, drumming and Ubuntu! I do my best to help as much as I can with Ubuntu and a lot of my time is spent on the super cool and you-should-totally-come-check-us-out manual project xD 
I’m going to be hanging around here writing articles every so often as I see the need to brain-fart my less than extensive knowledge onto you so I hope I can bring something new and exciting to your day.
Anyway, one thing that Joey doesn’t write about much is Ubuntu Server Edition. Possibly because he doesn’t have a server. Thankfully I do, so all those sysadmins out there can breath a sigh of relief because their favourite Ubuntu site now covers servers.. well.. a few posts at least.
Specifically I’m going to show you two easy-to-install applications that help you set up your own rockin’ LAMP home file server: AjaXplorer and phpsysinfo.
AjaXplorer
AjaXplorer is an easy-to-install file explorer for remotely managing files on a web server. Its rich client layout and actions make it accessible to any end-user for a variety of purposes: file management/sharing, photo gallery, code browsing, etc. PHP 5 is necessary, no database needed.
Because it’s web based, it plays nice with pretty much all operating systems. I use it in my flat, and we have a combination of Linux, Windows and Mac computers with all manner of browsers and it runs flawlessly, even though the server itself is running Ubuntu 9.10!
Some features:
- Repositories – you can create "repositories" that point to directories on your server
- User management – set permissions, passwords and allow users to only see certain repositories
- Detailed logs – keep track of who’s downloading what
- Audio previews – listen to audio tracks before you download
- Search – find that particular movie in a flash
- Select multiple files to download and AjaXplorer will zip them up for you!
- Slick interface complete with animations so all your OS X users will be happy
- Easy installation – just extract it into /var/www and away you go!
But hey, instead of looking at pretty pictures, why don’t you go and check out the demo?
phpsysinfo
phpsysinfo is a really neat way to see your server statistics. It’s a PHP script that displays stuff like:
- Uptime
- CPU usage
- Hardware information
- RAM and Disk usage
- Network statistics
You can see it in action running here.
Best of all, it’s in the repositories!
- sudo apt-get install phpsysinfo
Finally
…And just to show you why sysadmins are so cool:
xkcd.com