From HostThyself

Upon signing up for a VPS account, you will be presented with a bare system. Depending on the server provider and package, you may have different degree of customisation available to you.

The standard VPS setup that I had been using is a CentOS system with Webmin control panel.

This article describe the first few things that I do upon receiving an account.

Contents 1 Create a new user 2 Restrict root login 3 Update Packages with yum 4 Customise Webmin 5 Adjust Timezone

[edit] Create a new user

Normally a root account will be provided with a VPS server. However it is a good practice not to do everything with the root account. Instead, create a normal user and you could use the su or sudo command to do administrator tasks.

Add user and password

useradd username
passwd username

Add as trusted admin to "wheel" group:

usermod -G wheel username

Permits only root and users in group wheel to run /bin/su. Make sure the users are in the wheel group first!

chgrp wheel /bin/su
chmod 4750 /bin/su

[edit] Restrict root login

As a further security measure, you should restrict remote root login.

Test for su before turning off root login!

vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Locate and change the line "#PermitRootLogin yes" to: "PermitRootLogin no" Save the file.

Reload SSH

/etc/init.d/sshd reload

[edit] Update Packages with yum

Depending now how upto date your provider's VPS image, you would want to upgrade you system packages with yum.

yum update

Additional you may want to remove unnecessary packages.

yum erase package-name

Example of packages to remove

• samba
• samba-common
• finger
• finger-server

[edit] Customise Webmin

See Customizing Webmin.

[edit] Adjust Timezone

If you VPS is not in the same timezone as your location, you may want to adjust timezone to your localtime.

Alternatively you can set timezone to UTC or GMT.