Securing my server- am I missing anything?

[Carlo Gambino]

Hello all!

I am almost ready to take my LAMP server live! I want to ensure I have everything as secure as I possibly can before hand, so here is my list (please let me know if I've overlooked anything):

IPtables: I have configured this for ssh and http to be accessed from outside. Do I need to explicitly allow another port for sFTP or can it share a port with ssh?

rkhunter, chkrootkit and rkdet: Are they necessary? From all I hear about the difficulty of these things in the wild makes me wonder how effective they are. Input or suggestions?

fail2ban: I'm considering using this, although I've installed postfix to set up a mail server at some point, and from what I've heard the two don't mesh well.

System Screening: I've been reading a lot about tiger. This seems to me a worth-while package. I'd like to hear from people who've used it with any feedback.

Log Watch: I don't know which logs to really keep an eye on. Is this worth the install? I don't think there can be a replacement for looking the logs over manually. Is this a good choice or no?

After that, I think I got most of my bases covered. It's almost time to toss up some simple pages and start looking for holes.

[falko]

Originally Posted by Carlo Gambino

IPtables: I have configured this for ssh and http to be accessed from outside. Do I need to explicitly allow another port for sFTP or can it share a port with ssh?

No, port 22 is fine.

Originally Posted by Carlo Gambino

rkhunter, chkrootkit and rkdet: Are they necessary? From all I hear about the difficulty of these things in the wild makes me wonder how effective they are. Input or suggestions?

They are not necessary, but it doesn't hurt to have them installed. I use both on my systems.

Originally Posted by Carlo Gambino

fail2ban: I'm considering using this, although I've installed postfix to set up a mail server at some point, and from what I've heard the two don't mesh well.

I'm using fail2ban together with Postfix and haven't had any problems.

Originally Posted by Carlo Gambino

Log Watch: I don't know which logs to really keep an eye on. Is this worth the install? I don't think there can be a replacement for looking the logs over manually. Is this a good choice or no?

logwatch will send you huge emails each morning, so most likely you'll start to ignore these after a few days...

[ralic]

Originally Posted by falko

I'm using fail2ban together with Postfix and haven't had any problems.

Same for me. No problems so far.
Another benefit of fail2ban is that it will also help protect your sshd and other services as well.

I would add postgrey to your list and optionally spf if you plan to host virtual email domains.

I have a very low traffic mail site, but somehow a bogus address is on a spam list. As a result I was getting a bunch of activity to my domain catch all account due to a large number of postfix connects from spam bots. The majority of spam was getting caught by spamassassin, but still some got through and all the smapassassin activity was increasing my server load unnecessarily. Postgrey has handled this perfectly so far. Not one spam email has got through to be even analysed by spamassasin since I installed postgrey because the spam bots tend to only try once per spam run.

Similarly, there are already entries in my mail logs indicating that spf has rejected email due to spf failures and examining the entries gives me 99.9% certainty that they're bogus.