[ 2004-April-03 18:30 ]

This page is a collection of my tips and tricks I learned and used while setting up my own server. This is useful both for me, as a way of remembering what the hell I did, and for others who want to do similar things. I have a Debian Linux system hosted by Redwood Virtual. It is a User Mode Linux system, which means I get root access, but the physical system is shared by a bunch of nodes. It works great. If you sign up with them, please do me a big favour, and tell them Evan Jones sent you.

General Admin Tips

• Keep records of what you did to set the machine up. When you have to do it again for whatever reason, you will be happy.
• CVS can be your friend. I have a repository for my server's custom configurations and scripts.
• Automate. Don't do something by hand when you could write a script for it.
• Along that vein, if you can create packages for your configurations and software, you will be much happier. It makes it so much easier to install and remove your changes. I almost had to redo my configuration on my server, and if I ever do it again, I'll create Debian packages for nearly everything. This way I can get the base system back in under an hour.
• Help for creating packages: a quick tutorial and The Debian New Maintainers' Guide.

Web Server Stuff

• thttpd - High performance and low system utilization. Great if you are only serving static content and CGIs.
• thttpd gzip encoding patch - Use less bandwidth.
• thttpd md5 passwords patch - Make the htpasswd files more secure.

Email

Email is a struggle to set up correctly. Particularly in this day of spam. Debian has a lot of packages which help. I host local mail delivery for a couple of domains, and will relay mail for SMTP AUTH over TLS (SSL). I use PAM to authenticate users with their local passwords. My configuration:

• exim4-daemon-light - exim version 4
• sa-exim - Integrate spamassassin and exim
• spamassassin - spamassassin for filtering spam
• saslauthd - SASL authentication allowing exim to authenticate users using their UNIX passwords
• Make sure you are not an open relay.

DNS Stuff

I use bind to serve my domains. I'm using EveryDNS as my secondary server.

• Budget Names - The cheapest .ca registrar I could find.
• EveryDNS Free Secondary DNS - Used for my secondary DNS.
• Granite Canyon Free DNS Service
• Twisted4Life Free Secondary DNS
• ZoneEdit Free Secondary DNS

Monitoring

A system administrator must collect and process information to be able to determine if their system is running or not. This generally involves a lot of manual hackery.

• rrdtool - a very cool package for graphing time data. It requires lots of tweaking, but it rocks. I use it for graphing my ethernet traffic, disk space, and CPU usage.
• AWStats - Web server statistics analysis.
• Uptime Monitoring - Checks your server every 15 minutes and notifies you via email if it is not accessible.