The Perfect Server - Debian Lenny (Debian 5.0) With BIND & Dovecot [ISPConfig 3] - Page 3

4 Install The SSH Server

Debian Lenny does not install OpenSSH by default, therefore we do it now. Run

apt-get install ssh openssh-server

From now on you can use an SSH client such as PuTTY and connect from your workstation to your Debian Lenny server and follow the remaining steps from this tutorial.

5 Install vim-nox (Optional)

I'll use vi as my text editor in this tutorial. The default vi program has some strange behaviour on Debian and Ubuntu; to fix this, we install vim-nox:

apt-get install vim-nox

(You don't have to do this if you use a different text editor such as joe or nano.)

6 Configure The Network

Because the Debian Lenny installer has configured our system to get its network settings via DHCP, we have to change that now because a server should have a static IP address. Edit /etc/network/interfaces and adjust it to your needs (in this example setup I will use the IP address 192.168.0.100) (please note that I replace allow-hotplug eth0 with auto eth0; otherwise restarting the network doesn't work, and we'd have to reboot the whole system):

vi /etc/network/interfaces

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
#allow-hotplug eth0
#iface eth0 inet dhcp
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
        address 192.168.0.100
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        network 192.168.0.0
        broadcast 192.168.0.255
        gateway 192.168.0.1

Then restart your network:

/etc/init.d/networking restart

Then edit /etc/hosts. Make it look like this:

vi /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain   localhost
192.168.0.100   server1.example.com     server1

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1     localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts

Now run

echo server1.example.com > /etc/hostname
/etc/init.d/hostname.sh start

Afterwards, run

hostname
hostname -f

It is important that both show server1.example.com now!

7 Update Your Debian Installation

First make sure that your /etc/apt/sources.list contains the debian-volatile repository (this makes sure you always get the newest updates for the ClamAV virus scanner - this project publishes releases very often, and sometimes old versions stop working).

vi /etc/apt/sources.list

[...]
deb http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main contrib non-free

Run

apt-get update

to update the apt package database and

apt-get upgrade

to install the latest updates (if there are any).

8 Synchronize the System Clock

It is a good idea to synchronize the system clock with an NTP (network time protocol) server over the Internet. Simply run

apt-get install ntp ntpdate

and your system time will always be in sync.

9 Install Postfix, Dovecot, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, rkhunter, binutils

We can install Postfix, Dovecot, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, rkhunter, and binutils with a single command:

apt-get install postfix postfix-mysql postfix-doc mysql-client mysql-server openssl getmail4 rkhunter binutils dovecot-imapd dovecot-pop3d sudo

You will be asked the following questions:

New password for the MySQL "root" user: <-- yourrootsqlpassword
Repeat password for the MySQL "root" user: <-- yourrootsqlpassword
General type of mail configuration: <-- Internet Site
System mail name: <-- server1.example.com

We want MySQL to listen on all interfaces, not just localhost, therefore we edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf and comment out the line bind-address = 127.0.0.1:

vi /etc/mysql/my.cnf

[...]
# Instead of skip-networking the default is now to listen only on
# localhost which is more compatible and is not less secure.
#bind-address           = 127.0.0.1
[...]

Then we restart MySQL:

/etc/init.d/mysql restart

Now check that networking is enabled. Run

netstat -tap | grep mysql

The output should look like this:

server1:~# netstat -tap | grep mysql
tcp 0 0 *:mysql *:* LISTEN 7431/mysqld
server1:~#

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