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

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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