SliceHost define themselves as a ‘hosting company for people who know there stuff’ and after 2 years of building and maintaining a Linux server as part of my job I figured I either knew my stuff or could at least pretend I did. At the time, their popularity was such that you had to wait until they could meet your requirements, the wait dependent on the slice size and pre-payment term you wanted. It looks like customers now get to build their slice immediately.

On the plus side, I used the weeks to decide which Linux distro to use on my slice. After considering Fedora 8 in the vain hope it would be similar to RedHat, I eventually opted for Ubuntu 7.10 (aka Gutsy Gibbon) after noting that there were more articles on the SliceWiki than for other distros.

Security

Once I built the slice there were a few basic security tasks to get out of the way before going any further. The getting started article was a good place to start and covers all the security that in the past my hosting company would have done all this for me. So I changed the root password, created a new user and gave them sudo privilege, turned off root ssh access and as an extra security I also changed the ssh port to something memorable rather than 22. The article also covers using iptables as a firewall so I followed it to the letter, not having much previous experience with iptables.

The second part of the guide goes into more detail than I felt I needed so I limited myself to updating sources and upgrading the system as well as installing the build essentials. At the time I thought I would be building Apache, PHP and MySQL from source as I have had to do on Red Hat before now. How wrong I was…