Just Uber

Given the current fun and games with the community managed Ubuntu LoCo servers I’ve been thinking recently about server security.

Personally, any web servers that I’d ever run in my ‘day job’ would never have remote administration services like SSH/FTP etc open to the web (and more often than not, not at all), and would only ever have the minimum necessary port/s open on the firewall anyway.

Unfortunately, I realise that in a community effort it’s probably impossible to aspire to the ‘access at the server room only’ ideal. Volunteers need to remote admin servers from many different locations, so we need to keep those vulnerable services facing the web. The question really is ‘how do we secure our servers against attack?’

Given the seriousness of the matter, protection against attack often seems to be pretty far down in the pecking order when people go down the ‘teach yourself to be a linux sysadmin’ route, and it doesn’t seem to get that much discussion.

So – What sort of tools do you recommend for toughening your linux server?

By tools, I mean something in addition to the usual default install. For instance, I use denyhosts to stop SSH dictionary attacks on hobby/volunteer servers I run.

I’d be really interested to learn what works for you, and any interesting stories you have about security.

Don’t be shy

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 10:54 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.