close

Google Endpoint Security

Windows Azure is offering Extra Small Virtual Machines (1 vCPU, 768 MB RAM) at $9/mo, free for first 3 months. Yes, you read it right. You can get a Windows VMs at $9 (until May 31st) and Linux VMs at $15, at the same rate as Amazon Micro Instance, which is free for first year (boo Microsoft!). However, MSDN Ultimate subscribers get 1500h worth of Small VM hours for free! It is a good time to grab a VM or two and setup your own servers, where you can host your own blog and showcase your awesome open source projects. VMs are your own mini server, where you get full remote desktop access and do whatever you like. You don’t have to be limited to a web based control panel. It’s your own baby server on the cloud, fully scalable and redundant.

In this article, I will show you show to setup a rock solid Linux instance and configure some useful security and maintenance features:

  • Tune Apache, MySql, PHP to run within an Extra Small VM within the memory limits.
  • Secure your server from common brute force attacks.
  • Harden a WordPress instance and make it resilient to common failures.
  • Optimize your website for maximum client side caching and improve page load time.
  • Some handy Linux scripts and cron jobs that can take care of your server most of the time, identifying and fixing common problems and let you have your peace of mind.

This article is written from a Windows user point of view, who has never used Linux before. So, Linux gurus, don’t roll your eyes at me.

Create a Linux VM

Let’s first create a new Ubuntu server.

The admin user name on the Linux server is testadmin. We will use this to login to the Linux server.

Let’s select the “Provide Password” option instead of “Upload SSH key” to make the configuration simpler. If you use password option, then every time you login to the Linux VM using Putty (a client for working on Linux servers remotely from Windows), you will have to enter username and password. But if you use the certificate option, you won’t have to enter password always. It is definitely the better way to do it, but it is just a lot of extra steps to configure it. For simplicity, let’s ignore this for now.

Let’s name the server and choose a location where you want the server. You should choose a location where most of your users are going to come from. If you are hosting sites for Asia, do choose an Asian location. You will get much better website load performance because the network roundtrip time from your users computer to the server will be significantly lower.

Once the VM is created, it will look like this:

Go to the “Endpoints” tab, and see the public port that has been opened for SSH. SSH is the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) equivalent for Linux.

So, the server’s DNS is ubuntu23052013.cloudapp.net and SSH public port is 54423.

Connect to the VM

Let’s get and configure it to connect to this VM:

Put the DNS and the port. Then put a name on “Saved Sessions” and click Save. Then go to “Appearance” and change the font to Consolas, 15. Come back to this, and click “Save” again.

Now click “Open” and you will be taken to the remote session on the server. You will be asked to accept the server, just click Yes. Then use testadmin as username and the password you have configured while creating the VM.

Congratulations! You are now into a Linux server. Don’t be shocked, there’s no graphical client like Windows Remote Desktop. It is all command line based console. But you will be amazed how quickly you can get things done on Linux via command line. Windows Command Line isn’t even remotely close to being as powerful as Linux.

First, we will go to elevated command line, using the linux “sudo su” command.

When you see ”, that means you are in “root” mode (Windows equivalent of Administrator privilege).

Setup upgrade

Let’s do a quick check to see if there’s any upgrade pending. Run the command “do-release-upgrade”.

root@Test:/home/testadmin# do-release-upgrade

endpoint security checklist     endpoint security business

TAGS

CATEGORIES