Software

• /etc/apt/sources.list

  • Choose a sensible primary mirror
  • Ensure use of release codenames (eg. "lenny") instead of synonyms
  • Confirm security mirror is enabled
  • Remove references to contrib and non-free

• Disable installation of Recommends:

  echo 'APT::Install-Recommends "0";' > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/90recommends
  

• Ensure we are up to date security-wise:

  apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
  

• Setup and configure locales first to avoid annoying Perl warnings. Don't choose All locales; you almost certainly don't want that.

  apt-get install locales
  dpkg-reconfigure -plow locales
  

• Install some essential utilities:

  apt-get install vim-nox ntp openssh-server screen most tree bzip2 unzip moreutils dnsutils htop pwgen telnet manpages manpages-dev vrms acl gawk strace curl tcpdump
  

Users

• Before we create any real users, we configure PAM to reject weak passwords. Custom banned passwords can be added to the dictionary by editing /usr/share/dict/cracklib and running update-cracklib.

  apt-get install libpam-cracklib
  sed -i -e 's|^password|# \0|' /etc/pam.d/common-password
  echo 'password required    pam_cracklib.so retry=3 minlen=6 difok=3' >> /etc/pam.d/common-password
  echo 'password required    pam_unix.so use_authtok nullok md5' >> /etc/pam.d/common-password
  

  (Edit: Please read this response from Steve Langasek regarding this modification on squeeze and Ubuntu 8.10)

• Configure sudo. I prefer to create a new group instead of re-using adm as that is already used by logfiles.

  addgroup rootusers
  adduser myuser
  adduser myuser rootusers
  apt-get install sudo
  echo 'User_Alias ROOTUSERS  = %rootusers' >> /etc/sudoers
  echo 'ROOTUSERS, root     ALL=(ALL) ALL' >> /etc/sudoers
  

Mail relay

Email remains the primary method to asynchronously inform the system adminstrator that their attention is required.

It is assumed that the machine will not handle your day-to-day email (or indeed accept any external mail) but will instead simply forward it elsewhere. We also assume a preference for Exim, but the configuration for Postfix is almost identical.

• First, install the mail packages:

  apt-get install exim4-daemon-light bsd-mailx
  dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config
  

• During the Exim configuration, choose Internet site and follow all the defaults, ensuring that you only listen on 127.0.0.1 and you are not relaying mail for any other domains.

• If you did not do so during the debconf-based configuration, you can configure forwarding to another email address so we don't have to continually poll this machine for issues:

  echo 'root: you@example.com' >> /etc/aliases
  newaliases
  

• Finally, we test mail delivery:

  echo "Test 1 from $(hostname)" | mail root -s "Test 1 from $(hostname)"
  

The d-i manual has some further advice on this, including the use of "smarthosts".

Miscellaneous

• Stop Emacs creating backup files everywhere:

  mkdir -p /etc/emacs/site-start.d
  echo '(setq backup-inhibited t)' > /etc/emacs/site-start.d/10no-backup.el
  

• Configure Munin:

  apt-get install munin-node
  echo 'allow ^123\.123\.123\.123$' >> /etc/munin/munin-node.conf
  /etc/init.d/munin-node restart
  

  For baroque network configurations, you can generate the regular expression line with this script.

• Configure molly-guard, a tool for preventing accidental shutdowns. As molly-guard cannot detect shutdowns initiated within a combination of GNU screen and SSH, we configure it to always query the hostname:

  apt-get install molly-guard
  echo "ALWAYS_QUERY_HOSTNAME=true" >> /etc/molly-guard/rc
  

• Monitor disk S.M.A.R.T. attributes:

  apt-get install hddtemp smartmontools
  sed -i 's|^#start_smartd=yes|start_smartd=yes|' /etc/default/smartmontools
  /etc/init.d/smartmontools start
  

• Setup backups - I'm quite partial to backupninja because it automates most of the tedious SSH configuration. I adjust the time of the backup to when I'm likely to be around to fix issues and cut down on email noise by not reporting successful backups:

  apt-get install backupninja hwinfo debconf-utils rdiff-backup
  sed -i -e 's|^when = everyday at 01:00|when = everyday at 9:30|' /etc/backupninja.conf
  sed -i -e 's|^reportsuccess = yes|reportsuccess = no|' /etc/backupninja.conf
  ninjahelper
  

• Filesystems

  • In /etc/fstab, check noatime is enabled on all filesystems, and acl where needed.
  • Use tune2fs to adjust how much of the disk is reserved for the superuser - the default of 5% is excessive for large volumes.

• Reboot. You should be prompted by molly-guard before your computer restarts.