Build your own Linux server

Initial configuration
Usually, you would operate a Linux machine with a user account rather than the super-user root account, which provides privileges that allow you to render the OS inoperable. When setting things up for the first time, though, overall privileges are appropriate. Just be careful. The first job was to select the services that could safely be switched off, using the principle that only software whose purpose you know -- or at least have an idea ought to be running -- should be left live. The first candidate for switch-off was telnet -- there are few justifications these days for telnetting into a server, since it's very insecure and there are better alternatives such as the cross-platform VNC. We switched off cups and other print serving services, since we shan't be using those, along with NFS, Unix's native but insecure file sharing system. Other services disabled included SNMP, PCMCIA and, for the moment, httpd -- the Apache Web server. Items we ensured were running included Squid, the Web caching service; FTP, so we could access files from elsewhere on the network; and of course SMB, the Samba server that shares files for Windows networks. Once it looked more like a server, we switched on the required features. First we created user accounts with RHL's user manager and assigned their home directories to folders on the 40GB disk. On this occasion, there was no need to rummage around in Linux's text-based configuration files. With that basic task done, it was time to turn to start building the server proper.