How I set up my Debian server

20 February 2010

Recently I moved my websites to a virtual private server (VPS / VDS) from Memset. Rather than pay an extra £7.50/month for cPanel, I decided to configure it myself. This is my notes about what I did. It’s not designed to be a guide for everyone, but someone may find it useful…

Prerequisites

The server was set up with Debian Lenny (5.0.4), with minimal software installed. I was given the root password, with no user accounts set up.

Set the hostname

The default hostname with Memset is XXX.miniservers.com. I changed that to my own domain name.

# hostname precipuus.net
# echo "precipuus.net" > /etc/hostname
# echo "precipuus.net" > /etc/mailname

Check Debian is up-to-date

# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade

Prevent accidental shutdowns

Just in case I accidentally type shutdown in the wrong window like Steve did here!

# apt-get install molly-guard

Set the timezone

# dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Install NTP client to automatically keep the time accurate

# apt-get install ntp

Install Vim (text editor)

# apt-get install vim vim-common vim-doc vim-scripts ctags

Install sudo

# apt-get install sudo
# visudo

Change the Defaults line to make it use the root password not the user password, and not bother with the security lecture:

Defaults env_reset,rootpw,!lecture

Add this to allow anyone in the sudo group to use it, as long as they know the root password of course:

%sudo ALL=(ALL) ALL

Create a user account

Now we have sudo set up, create and switch to a normal user account:

# adduser dave
# usermod -aG sudo dave
# su dave

Add keep-alive to SSH server

I found my SSH connection would time out occasionally when I left it open for a while, so I set up keep-alive:

$ sudo vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Add this to the end:

ClientAliveInterval 300

And then reload the configuration:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/ssh reload

Install Bazaar 2.0 (version control)

The current version of Bazaar in Lenny is 1.5, so I had to get 2.0 from backports, and the corresponding bzrtools from testing. First, add the two repositories to apt:

$ sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list

Add these to the end:

# Testing - for bzrtools 2.0
deb     http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free

# Backports - for bzr 2.0
deb http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/backports.org/ lenny-backports main contrib non-free

Now make sure it doesn’t automatically upgrade packages using these repositories:

$ sudo vim /etc/apt/preferences

Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: *
Pin: release a=lenny-backports
Pin-Priority: 675

Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 650

Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 600

And also increase the cache limit to fit the new data in:

$ sudo vim /etc/apt/apt.conf

Add these to the start of the file (leaving the Memset proxy section alone):

APT::Default-Release "stable";
APT::Cache-Limit 125829120;

Now install Bazaar:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install debian-backports-keyring
$ sudo apt-get install -t lenny-backports bzr
$ sudo apt-get install -t testing bzrtools
$ sudo apt-get autoremove

At this point I set up my standard Linux config files, which I keep in a Bazaar repository.

Install Exim (mail server)

I set up Exim to forward mail from my various domains to my Google Mail account. Since it’s just forwarding everything, there’s no user accounts and no anti-spam/anti-virus.

$ sudo apt-get remove postfix
$ sudo apt-get install exim4-daemon-heavy

n.b. I’m not sure if -heavy is required, or if the -light version would do.

It then asks a number of questions:

General type: Internet site
System mail name: precipuus.net
IP addresses: blank for all
Other destinations: leave as default
Domains to relay for: blank
Machines to relay for: blank
Split configuration into small files? Yes
Root and postmaster mail recipient: dave

Next, I originally set up greylisting. I later removed it because the added delay wasn’t worth it for the limited amount of spam I actually get, which Google Mail filters out anyway. But this is how to set it up:

$ sudo apt-get install greylistd
$ sudo greylistd-setup-exim4 add -netmask=24

Create a directory for the per-domain forwarding files:

$ sudo mkdir /etc/exim4/virtual

Tell Exim to accept the domains listed in that directory for local delivery / forwarding:

$ sudo vim /etc/exim4/conf.d/main/01_exim4-config_listmacrosdefs

Change this line:

domainlist local_domains = MAIN_LOCAL_DOMAINS

To this:

domainlist local_domains = MAIN_LOCAL_DOMAINS : dsearch;/etc/exim4/virtual

Now set up a router to tell Exim to use these files for forwarding:

$ sudo vim /etc/exim4/conf.d/router/350_local-virtual_aliases

forced_virtual_aliases:
 driver = redirect
 allow_defer
 allow_fail
 local_parts = postmaster : abuse
 data = $local_part
 retry_use_local_part
 pipe_transport = address_pipe
 file_transport = address_file
 no_more

virtual_aliases:
 driver = redirect
 allow_defer
 allow_fail
 domains = dsearch;/etc/exim4/virtual
 local_part_suffix = +*
 local_part_suffix_optional
 data = ${expand:${lookup{$local_part}lsearch*@{/etc/exim4/virtual/$domain}}}
 retry_use_local_part
 pipe_transport = address_pipe
 file_transport = address_file
 no_more

Note that the first section forwards abuse@ and postmaster@ for all domains to the equivalent local addresses.

Check root / abuse / postmaster emails are all forwarded to me:

$ sudo vim /etc/aliases

It should contain the following lines, among others:

postmaster: root
abuse: root
root: dave

Now forward all these emails to my main email address, but keep a copy locally in case forwarding is broken:

$ echo "dave, XXXXXX@googlemail.com" > ~/.forward

Now restart Exim with the new configuration:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/exim4 restart

Set up the forwarding file for each domain:

$ sudo vim /etc/exim4/virtual/dave-miller.com

example:    example@somewhere.com
bounce:     :fail:
blackhole:  :blackhole:
*:          catchall@somewhere.com

Finally, install Mutt to read email at the command line:

$ sudo apt-get install mutt

Install Apache (web server), MySQL (database server), PHP

$ sudo apt-get remove apache
$ sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 php5-cli php5-mysql php5-mcrypt php5-gd mysql-server
$ a2enmod expires rewrite
$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

I’ll leave out the rest of my Apache configuration because it’s very specific to me.

Set up SFTP with chroot jail for normal users

First, SFTP requires that all parent directories of the jail root are owned and only writable by root:

$ sudo chown root:root /home
$ sudo chmod 755 /home
$ sudo mkdir /home/jail

Create a group for jailed SFTP users:

$ sudo addgroup sftponly

Configure SSH:

$ sudo vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Remove or comment out this line (by adding a # to the start of it):

Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server

Add this instead:

Subsystem sftp internal-sftp
Match Group sftponly
  ChrootDirectory /home/jail/%u
  AllowTCPForwarding no
  X11Forwarding no
  ForceCommand internal-sftp

Restart SSH server:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

Now create users to be jailed:

$ sudo adduser jason
$ sudo usermod -aG sftponly jason
$ sudo chmod 750 /home/jason
$ sudo mkdir /home/jail/jason
$ sudo mkdir /home/jail/jason/etc
$ sudo mkdir /home/jail/jason/private
$ sudo mkdir /home/jail/jason/example.com
$ sudo su -c "sed -n '/^(root|jason|www-data):/p' /etc/passwd > /home/jail/jason/etc/passwd"
$ sudo su -c "sed -n '/^(root|jason|www-data):/p' /etc/group > /home/jail/jason/etc/group

And set up any directories inside the jail to point to the directories outside the jail:

$ sudo vim /etc/fstab