The Perfect Server - Debian Squeeze (Debian 6.0) With BIND, Dovecot & Nginx [ISPConfig 3] - Page 3

4 Install The SSH Server

If you didn't install an SSH server during the basic system installation, you can do it now:

apt-get install ssh openssh-server

Note: The commands in this tutorial assume that you are logged in as root. You might also want to delete the CD-ROM line in your /etc/apt/sources.list:

vi /etc/apt/sources.list

and press d twice in quick succession to delete a single line until all the CD-ROM entries are deleted. If you delete a line too many enter :q! to quit without saving and try again.

You should be able to use a terminal or SSH client such as PuTTY and connect from your workstation to your Debian Squeeze server and follow the remaining steps from this tutorial.

5 Install vim-nox (Recommended)

If you use vi as the in-terminal text editor you should install the following package. The default vi program on Debian and Ubuntu has some serious bugs that make editing impossible at times, so to fix this we install vim-nox:

apt-get install vim-nox

(You may skip that step and install a different text editor such as joe or nano instead if you prefer it to vi.)

6 Configure The Network

Because the Debian Squeeze installer has configured our system to get its network settings via DHCP, you have to change that configuration now because a server should have a static IP address. Edit /etc/network/interfaces with a text editor and adjust it to suit your needs (in this example setup the IP address 192.168.0.100 is used). Please note that allow-hotplug eth0 should be replaced with auto eth0 otherwise restarting the network interfaces does not work, and would require a system reboot. To edit with vi enter:

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

/etc/init.d/networking restart

Then edit /etc/hosts. It should look similar to 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     ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters

Now run:

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

or

vi /etc/hostname

/etc/init.d/hostname.sh start

and edit the hostname that way.

Afterwards, run

hostname
hostname -f

After both commands server1.example.com must appear! If you already set the hostname and domain name during the installation process it should probably be correct although the IP address and the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) must be inserted in the /etc/hosts file. In a local installation you could use the .local as the top-level domain (TLD) but in this scenario you need a DNS server that is configured properly to resolve local IP addresses.

7 Add the Dotdeb Repository And Update Your Debian System

This step is critical for getting nginx to work with ISPConfig 3 and your Debian 6 system. Add the Dotdeb repository by editing the /etc/apt/sources.list file and inserting the 2 lines and optional comment and download and add the GPG key:

vi /etc/apt/sources.list

[...]
# Dotdeb repository
deb http://packages.dotdeb.org squeeze all
deb-src http://packages.dotdeb.org squeeze all
[...]

Then fetch the appropriate GnuPG key:

wget http://www.dotdeb.org/dotdeb.gpg
cat dotdeb.gpg | apt-key add -

Also make sure that your /etc/apt/sources.list contains the squeeze-updates 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).

[...]
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-updates main
[...]

Run:

apt-get update

to update the apt package repository database and if any upgrades are available they will be available to install when you:

apt-get upgrade

8 Change The Default Shell

/bin/sh is a symlink to /bin/dash, however /bin/bash is necessary not /bin/dash. Therefore do this:

dpkg-reconfigure dash

Use dash as the default system shell (/bin/sh)? <-- No

9 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

to keep your system time in sync.