Inveigled By Design

After much frustration with trying to work within the confines of a shared host, I’ve taken the plunge and set up my own server on a linode. I looked around at VPS providers, tried a few, and ended up with linode because of their configuration options, pricing, and choice of either 32 bit or 64 bit operating systems. I found that working on a smaller VPS requires optimizing memory usage and 32 bit operating systems are easier in that regard.


If you are going to set up your own server, I’d recommend checking out the Securing Debian Manual. It has suggestions about partitioning that may affect how you configure your system initially.

To do the initial setup, I followed along with these guides:

• Debian Lenny Setup Part 1
• Debian Lenny Setup Part 2
• Scanning for rootkits with rkhunter
• Scanning for rootkits with chkrootkit
• Setting up email series

You’ll also want to check out other security programs like tripwire, logcheck, fail2ban etc. I’m not going to go into how to install and use them since I’m just getting this figured out myself. I do recommend you spend some time learning about security so you don’t end up with a hijacked server.

Okay, so that is most of the canned stuff. In upcoming posts I’ll cover:

• Setting up Nginx with Ruby on Rails using Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition
• Setting up and Testing Php on Nginx