It’s been quiet here for a while, but be things have been happening behind the scenes. In case your wondering the site (and surroundings) have been seeing a number of updates which eventually may make it into separate posts.
I’m running on a Digital Ocean droplet. It was provisioned as an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which is dead by now (as in no more updates including security updates). The server has now been roll up to an Ubuntu 16.
As stated earlier this site is now running on a DigitalOcean droplet. A droplet is basically the same as having a “real server”, and when running a bare bones machine, it isn’t born with the ability to handle email - receiving nor sending. As a number of web apps require the ability to handle mail, I had to setup facilities on the server (or droplet) to handle mail.
The “default” way to do this would probably be to install sendmail or postfix, as they are full-featured mail server, but configuring a mail-server, keeping it secure and updated is a nightmare I’d like to avoid.
df -lP |awk '{sum += $3} END {printf "%d GiB\\n", sum/2\*\*20}' - via @clmagic
So, I’ve been moving the site to a VPS - a Virtual Private Server. A VPS is basically the same as a physical server to which you can’t have physical access. When you get your virtual server, most likely it will be setup with a basic disk image with an Operating System and a root account. In my case at DigitalOcean I choose to setup an Ubuntu Linux image and here are the first moves you should take after creating the VPS to get the basic security in place.
A firewall is a basic filter that can provide an efficient protection to your server by only allowing the traffic in and out as the rules of the firewall allows it. Setting up a firewall on a Ubuntu Linux server does not need to be complicated - in fact the one used in this example is called “uncomplicated firewall”.
To get the firewall up and running make sure it’s installed through the package manager.