Virtualmin and Centos 6 on a Linode
Ready to move your hosted websites to a new a Virtualmin + LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl-PHP) server on a Linode? Here's the steps to get everything working smoothly with a minimum of hassle:
Initial Preparation
First, starting with a freshly provisioned CentOS install, ssh into the root account. Let's see what we actually have for a distribution:
$ cat /etc/issue
CentOS Linux release 6.0 (Final)
Kernel r on an m
First, create regular user accounts for the administrators, and disable direct root login. We will place these administrators into the 'wheel' group so they can sudo, and also create a developer group:
# groupadd devel
# useradd -c "Winston Smith" -g devel --groups wheel -m -s /bin/bash wsmith
Use the visudo* *command to edit the /etc/sudoers file, removing the leading # to un-comment this line:
## Allows people in group wheel to run all commands
%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL
Now, set a password for yourself:
# passwd wsmith
The logout, and ssh back in as wsmith
If you haven't read the Linode Security Basics article,
now's a good time. At the very least, disable root logins by editing
the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file to modify the PermitRootLogin option
as follows:
PermitRootLogin no
Then restart ssh:
$ sudo service sshd restart
I also recommend fail2ban, which should reduce the clutter and risk of repeated ssh attacks:
$ sudo yum install fail2ban
$ sudo chkconfig --level 23 fail2ban on
$ sudo service fail2ban start
Next, edit /etc/sysconfig/network and change the hostname. If there
is no HOSTNAME line, add one with your desired machine name in your
domain; it should look like:
HOSTNAME=linode1.example.com
That file is read at boot, so you might also want to set the hostname for the current session:
`
$ sudo hostname linode1.example.com `
Be sure that your DNS server has an A Record with that exact name, pointing to your new server.
Install Updates before Virtualmin
Now we will update the base system --
`
$ sudo yum update `
We haven't installed PHP and MySQL yet, but let's see what versions will be installed from our currently selected repositories:
$ yum search php
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
============================================ Matched: php ============================================
php.i686 : PHP scripting language for creating dynamic web sites
php-bcmath.i686 : A module for PHP applications for using the bcmath library
php-cli.i686 : Command-line interface for PHP
php-common.i686 : Common files for PHP
...
$ yum list php
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Available Packages
mysql.i686 5.1.52-1.el6_0.1 updates
php.i686 5.3.2-6.el6_0.1 updates
OK, well that's not the latest, but Centos assures us (as of mid-October 2011) that Centos 6.1 will have updates. Meantime, the folks at Centos recommend the use of the Continuous Release (CR) repository, see this article.
$ sudo yum install centos-release-cr
$ sudo yum update
That installed, on my system, 144 new and updated packages. Now let's see what that will do for us in terms of PHP and MySQL:
$ yum list php mysql
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
...
Available Packages
mysql.i686 5.1.52-1.el6_0.1 updates
php.i686 5.3.3-3.el6 cr
Ah, a nice fresh version of PHP. Before going much further, I find it convenient to also install the console version of emacs for editing, and the 'screen' package for multi-virtual-screen remote administration:
`
$ sudo yum install emacs-nox screen `
Load Virtualmin
Download the install.sh script from http://www.virtualmin.com/download.html into /usr/src ... and then execute it:
`
$ sudo bash # cd /usr/src # wget http://software.virtualmin.com/gpl/scripts/install.sh
sh install.sh
`
That may take some time indeed! Eventually you should see:
INFO - Updating SpamAssassin rules...
INFO - Rule updates done
[root@linode1 src]#
Once it completes, login, as root, to your new virtualmin configuration at your linode's address: https://linode1.example.com:10000 .. and then read the next part of this article.
Useful Tools
sudo yum install emacs-nox screen
For PHP with Graphics support
sudo yum install gd php-gd ImageMagick ImageMagick-devel php-devel httpd-devel
sudo pecl install imagick
<em>(and, as root) </em>echo "extension=imagick.so" > /etc/php.d/imagick.ini
sudo apachectl graceful
The php-devel module is required for loading ImageMagick into PHP;
without it, you will get phpize: command not found. Note that the
pecl command above actually compiles some code, so you need the gcc
compilers and the various development modules.
Webmin and fail2ban
If you ever use Webmin to edit your firewall rules, you should be sure to do this last step. It's also handy if you lock yourself out of your secure shell, to be able to do a one-time reset of fail2ban's rules from the webmin interface.
Login to Webmin. Under Networking, on the “Linux Firewall” main page,
click Module Config in the upper-left of the pane. On the configuration
page, in the “Configurable options” section, look for the line “Command
to run after applying configuration.” Click the button next to the text
box on that line, and in the text box enter service fail2ban restart
and then click the Save button at the bottom of the page. Now, whenever
you click “Apply Configuration” on the Firewall rule page, it will
automatically restart fail2ban.