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Some of the first steps to take after your Dedicated Server is ready...

Once your dedicated server is up and running there might be a few things that you will need to do to secure and update it.  Since we only offer release versions of operating systems there might be some newer packages you should think about picking up.  We only offer the release version of an OS as to give people a certain expectation of what they are getting.  That way if they software designed for a particular release then nothing is broken without them knowing it.  This way our customers have a little bit more control over their systems.

After you have recieved your welcome letter for us you can login and start the updated process.  CentOS is an extremely easy OS to update to current libraries and kernel releases.  The utility that is used to start the update process is called YUM.  In order to run YUM you must be the root user of the machine.  You can run it as another user if you use the sudo command, but that still makes you the root user without logging in as such.  To update your machine just type - yum update - at your command prompt and it will start doing its magic.

For a list of YUM commands you can look at this official documentation from Red Hat on how to use YUM: <a href="http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-5-manual/en-US/RHEL510/Deployment_Guide/s1-yum-useful-commands.html">YUM Commands</a>

Yum udate - will then go through and build a list of software packages that are on your computer and then check it against an official repository.  This will only check the official repositories for CentOS.  We will discuss adding additional repositories later on.  Once yum has created its cache, it will then display a list of available updates available to you.  It is wise to look over the list to see exactly is going to be installed during the update.  It might include libraries that would cause some software elements to break.  It is always good to use caution in times like this.  If the list includes items you do not want to update; then just choose, no.  You can also update individual packages by using - yum update <packagename>.

When you are trying to install a new piece of software on your server and it isn't finding it using YUM; you might want to try to setup additional repositories.  The repositories that are currently on your dedicated server are the stock release repositories.  We don't add any as it can be a source of confusion when updating your server.  There are several type of repositories avaiable.

Now that your dedicated server has been updated it is time to harden it for security reasons.  You will want to disable root login in your sshconfig.  This makes it so you cannot log into an ssh connection as the root user.  We want to disable this so that if someone might be sniffing for passwords they don't accidently get your root passord.  We need to edit this file in a text editor.  You can use either VI, VIM, or NANO to accomplish this.  Open up your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file in your text editor.  Then look for a ling that reads: PermitRootLogin yes.  You can either comment the line out '#' or change the yes to no.  Tell it to save the file then issue a: /etc/init.d/sshd restart at the command prompt to restart the ssh daemon.