Alex, Just wondering, but what student organization is it? I am a little biased here, but I would recommend installing CentOS over Debian, but I'm sure that others on this mailing list will disagree with me. This guide should be a good starting point for what you are looking to do: http://www.howtoforge.com/centos-5.1-server-lamp-email-dns-ftp-ispconfig <http://www.howtoforge.com/centos-5.1-server-lamp-email-dns-ftp-ispconfig>The NSA has really good guides on securing Operating Systems, here is the one for RHEL/CentOS: http://www.nsa.gov/ia/guidance/security_configuration_guides/operating_syste... <http://www.nsa.gov/ia/guidance/security_configuration_guides/operating_systems.shtml#linux2>Hopefully this gets you on the right track, if you have any further questions please ask. -Conner On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 4:44 AM, Alex Camilo <alex.camilo@gmail.com> wrote:

The student organization i belong to has recently been entrusted with a retired dell power edge 2650 rack mount server. Me and another club member are going to be in charge of setting up and maintaining the server. I'm pretty sure there is a lot of information i'm simply not aware of and i was wondering if anyone with IT experience would be willing to give me a few pointers.

My current plan is to install a minimal system (prefferably debian based) install the services i need (LAMP) and then harden the box with a set of restrictive iptables rules and keep up to date with security updates.

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