Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Tue, Jan 20, 2004 at 09:12:19AM -0500, Michael Best wrote:
> I am considering setting up a web server machine at my home to host some of
> my web sites.  So far, I've installed Red Hat Linux 9.0 and not much else.
> But now I'm kind of stuck.  Also I'm not even sure if Linux is the way to
> go.  I've heard good things about BSD (Open/Free) also.  What I'd really
> like is an install will give me what I want out of the box: web, email, dns,
> ssh, web-based configuration for all of the above, plus perl, php, c/c++
> compilers, tcl, mysql, etc.
> 
> What experience have you had with setting up a web server?  Thanks for your
> time.

I've been doing Web server admin for ten years, on Solaris, RedHat, and
various other Unices, and systems admin on same for nearly as long.

The only piece of useful advice I can offer that you can't get by
reading the relevant documentation for each package is this:

if you're going to put a machine on the public Internet, for heaven's
sake please make sure it's secure, that it isn't running anything that
you don't know is running (and hence can't be certain it doesn't have
some horrible security flaw that will be exploited within four hours of
coming online) and that you monitor it closely to stay sure. Don't run
anything you do not need to be running, except insofar as you monitor
it closely - and this includes email services especially, but shouldn't
be limited to those; you'd be surprised at how common services can be
abused in order to contribute to other activities (e.g., proxy servers
relaying email and/or ssh connections, etc.)

Subscribe to the relevant mailing lists (Bugtraq, redhat-watch-list, etc.)
so that you're kept apprised of security issues as they arise. Oh, and
/read/ them, too, you can learn a lot.

If you don't know how to monitor a server's security, keep it off the
Internet until you do. The rest of us thank you. :) I learned this from
an even more grizzled bunch of sysadmins, and the only times I've ever
been in difficult situations not related to suicidal hardware, it's been
because I (or someone else on the same local network) ignored that advice.

Thanks, hope this helps.
Steve

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