Re: Secure host newbie

[Tiago Quadra <tquadra () soldafamilia com>]

        Simon,

        I think you are starting with the wrong choise by using RH7.3 as
your distro. RedHat is no longer providing security updates for RH7.3, you
will have a lot of extra work to make your box free of bugs - building
from source all the major packets. Slackware, Debian or Suse are better
choises. Do not put all those services on the same server, specially POP,
SMTP and SSH on the same server that runs HTTP/HTTPS for money
transactions.

        Security depends on what level of security you "think" you need
and how much you can/want to pay. I'm sure you don't need to buy
an expensive solutions, but expecting to learn all you need in one or
two days reading docs and asking questions on lists is not very realistic
if it's for a real bussiness.

        Have a look at www.linux-sec.net, but you should pay an expert to
help you. Look for someone who will know how to work close to your budget,
there are guys out there who doesn't know how to work without a big
budget. There are a lot of ways to improve security with low budget, but
hire someone to help you.

        Tiago Quadra.

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 xilopublic1 () ca inter net wrote:

> Hi there,
>   I'm going to put a host on the internet in a day or two, it will be closed to public
> during the development stage.  We
> have a lot of services to setup and I was wondering about security issues for each of
> these services.  We will be
> running this on a Redhat 7.3 base system.
>
> The services we will have are HTTP (Apache), private FTP, SSH access, POP server for our
> users, SMTP for users
> that would have to use ours, SSL for secure money transactions, might have news server,
> might have a MP3 stream
> server and will have home-made servers for home-made clients.
>
> Now, before I ask you guys a whole lot of newbie questions, I would like to read good
> documents on these topics.
> Howtos, documentation, tutorials, books, all kinds of references are appreciated,
> especially if I can get them free!
> (Since our budget is extremely limited).
>
> Thanks,
>
> Simon
>
>
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ethical Hacking at the InfoSec Institute. Mention this ad and get $545 off 
any course! All of our class sizes are guaranteed to be 10 students or less 
to facilitate one-on-one interaction with one of our expert instructors. 
Attend a course taught by an expert instructor with years of in-the-field 
pen testing experience in our state of the art hacking lab. Master the skills 
of an Ethical Hacker to better assess the security of your organization. 
Visit us at: 
http://www.infosecinstitute.com/courses/ethical_hacking_training.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------------