Be Technical by Techniques

Following command can be used to create a test VPS instance on OpenVZ.

vzctl create 101 --ostemplate centos-5-minimal
vzctl set 101 --hostname vz101.sudhaker.com --save
vzctl set 101 --ipadd 192.168.0.101 --save
vzctl set 101 --nameserver 192.168.0.1 --save
vzctl set 101 --onboot yes --save
vzctl start 101

Optional: To install common utilities inside VPS

vzyum 101 install findutils wget jwhois bind-utils unzip -y

Optional: To install yum inside VPS

vzyum 101 install yum -y

Optional: To set bigger disk quota (4GB soft limit, 5GB hard limit)

vzctl set 101 --diskspace 4194304:5242880 --save
vzctl set 101 --diskinodes 80000:100000 --save

Suppose we want to extract and see the RPM content without installing it. This is how we can do it It should work on any RPM based system like redhat, fedora, centos etc.
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This article explains an isolated and much secured MySQL setup in OpenVZ environment. The container VPS for “database node” can be a centos-5-minimal (centos-5-i386-minimal.tar.gz) and without any IP address for extra security.
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“The only secure computer is one that’s unplugged, locked in a safe and buried 20 feet under the ground in a secret location… and I’m not even too sure about that one.” — Dennis Huges, FBI.

Quote mentioned above is not to scare you from connecting your machine to network, but to give you a message that there is nothing like a “perfectly secured and networked computer”. The best we can do is to harden the security and actively monitor it. Especially when it is a server running 24×7 and serving your critical data to the Internet.
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This tutorial is about preparing a “very secure hosting” environment using bunch of proven open-source and free products (CentOS, OpenVZ, Lighttpd, PHP, MySQL, Power DNS). I used these techniques for configuring my first dedicated server (Celeron-2.8 ghz, 512MB, 80GB).
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Source: WikiPedia

The Yellow dog Updater, Modified (YUM) is a free software/open source command line package management utility for RPM-compatible Linux operating systems. It was developed by Seth Vidal and a group of volunteer programmers, and is currently maintained as part of Duke University’s Linux@DUKE project. Though yum is a command line utility, several other tools provide graphical user interfaces to yum, among them pup, pirut, and yumex. Seth Vidal now works for Red Hat and a number of other Red Hat programmers are involved in the development of yum.

Yum Quickstart
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Tutorial objectives
* To install CentOS using their first CD only.
* To install true minimal CentOS for custom deployment need (say firewall, vps infrastructure, etc).
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