I am now my own server admin. Cool!
This weekend I took the plunge and set up my own VPS on Linode. The thing that drove me to finally ditch my GoDaddy shared hosting was Git. Git was one of the first tools I was introduced to as a developer at PhotoShelter, and it has completely changed my expectations for a testing environment- not to mention saved my ass more than once. I needed a server of my own where I was free to install the tools I wanted.
I chose to go with Ubuntu as it’s known for being a good beginner Linux distro, and there are tons of tutorials out there catering to it. Overall, the single biggest pain has been permissions. Everything seemed to require a different permission! Finally I figured out how to add users to groups and use umask to set defaults, and things started falling into place. Read on for a full list of what I’ve done so far!
- set hostname
- ran update
- ran upgrade
- created new admin user
- setup ssh key pair authentication
- disabled ssh root login
- installed apache, configured, optimized
- installed mysql, secured, optimized
- installed php, configured
- installed phpmyadmin, secured
- installed apache2-utils
- installed vsftpd
- installed imagemagick
- created groups, added users, set defaults
- added sites, for each:
- configured virtualhosts
- ported db, added db user
- ported files
- changed dns
- set permissions
- re-signed ssl certs
- configured vsftpd, added limited-access ftp account
- installed git, created repos
- set up port-based virtual hosts (dev views)
- fixed weird issue with mod_rewrite and mod_headers
- installed node
- installed ruby
- installed sass
- installed geoip
Still a lot more to do, but I’m beginning to have a pretty solid playground.