Endpoint Security Checkpoint Windows 8

The blogging software used to power this site, , has just had its 10th anniversary. In the last decade it has become incredibly popular, and currently accounts for about 18% of all websites. Due to my job at (mt) Media Temple, I’ve gotten to admin at various times over the years, and thus have a pretty good idea of how to optimize everything for good efficiency. In this WordPress configuration tutorial, I’m going to walk you through the production quality setup that I have for this blog, which makes use of , , and .

UPDATE: I have recently switched over from using the plugin for caching to the plugin. My reasons are varied. While I don’t think it provides quite the same level of bare metal performance for page caching that WP Super Cache does, I still think it’s the better choice right now. It has significant additional options, is trivial to configure, and makes great use of the APC cache features if available. If there’s sufficient interest I’ll update this post or make another to talk about it.

I’ll be making several assumptions throughout this article. Specifically:

• You are using Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) or a newer supported release.
• You are using a “naked” install of Ubuntu (no control panels or anything of that sort).
• You have the ability to run all the commands I’ll list as root using sudo.
• You’re just going to use the server you’re using for a WordPress blog, or you have a good enough understanding of user permissions not to create any security risks.
• You’ll be serving up a blog at example.com, and you’ll be running various services with user and group permissions of a user called example, which needs to exist on your system.

Step 1: Install Needed Software

There’s a variety of things you’ll want to install on your system. For starters, let’s install Nginx and MariaDB. Nginx is very easy as I have a with all the goodies you’ll need ready to go. In case you don’t already have it, install python-software-properties with:

Now, you can add my Nginx PPA and install it:

MariaDB is also very easy to install. You’ll need to import their signing key first with the command:

When you install the server software, you’re going to have to enter a password for the root MariaDB user (which is NOT to be confused with the system root user, though they are used in similar ways here). Looking ahead, let’s pre-select a strong password with the apg password generator.

This will generate a half dozen reasonably strong 10 character passwords to pick from. Choose one and keep it handy. Now, to install MariaDB, use your favorite editor (I’m assuming it’s , obviously) and create the file:

Put the following* into the file:

*If you are using a distribution different than Ubuntu Lucid (10.04), replace lucid in the above two lines with the distro name you have installed.

Now, install MariaDB with the commands:

The installer will prompt you for a password for the root user, so enter the password you got from the apg output earlier. For a pro tip, make a file at ~/.my.cnf with the following contents:

and change the permissions so only you can read it: