Getting the basics done

So I’ve setup my SliceHost account and have created a server (the 256mb of ram one for $20 a month). First off though I needed to the usual house keeping when setting up a new server.

The Centos image at slicehost is bare basic and only comes with openssh, where as the Ubuntu image has a bunch of things out of the box which is nice. The down side of this being that I’ve got to evaluate and remove the things I don’t want. I know what I’m doing with iptables, so I don’t want FireHol for example.

Seeing as my blogging on this project isn’t targeted at how to setup a server from scratch I won’t bore you with the details of why I use vim and zsh instead of something else and bash etc.. Although I will though throw in a couple of links I found helpful in my transition between distributions which answer my ‘err, how do you achieve this in Ubuntu’ and ‘where the feck do they put that’ type questions.

As previously mentioned I like to hit up HowToForge as it’s a fantastic resource and has served me well for a couple of years now. On there people like to post instructions on setting up their idea of a ‘Perfect Server’, I’ve pulled from in a couple of places out of this one for instance. For example, I didn’t know about FireHOL until reading this.

Additionally the community help/docs portion of the Ubuntu site was quite helpful, in particular the iptables how-to solved my problem of persistence through restarts. I have just used my base configuration for this and will expand it out as needed.

Next up is actually installing and configuring the main stack. I’ll go and find myself a good code formatting wordpress plug first before blogging about that.

On a side note, with my first post on this topic three days ago I mentioned Ponoko. The post was published less then two hours before Google’s daily alert digest to me covering the key word of ‘Ponoko’. My post was in that list, and the same happened for my next post. I was quite impressed as to how quickly that got picked up considering how inactive my blog has been up until recently. So I’ve mentioned Ponoko again. primarily just for the heck of it, and to get the traffic. :-)

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