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Comment by jnsaff2 | Hacker News Reader

It took me about an hour to put all of this into an ansible playbook. I think there are couple of examples out on blogs about this as well. If there is interest I'll share my playbook.

Writing this playbook paid off already for the second installation of the box.

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The most I know about securing a Linux vps I picked up from this: http://feross.org/how-to-setup-your-linode/ . If there is an ultimate resource on how to start securing a *nix vps then please do let me know. If I knew what to search for I could but a lot of this is unknown unknowns to me.

After having fixed a sudo user (and confirm it works!), please also disable PermitRootLogin by setting it to 'no'.

Restart ssh after editing sshd_conf.

If you're squeemish, run dropbear on another port so you can log into your machine in case you made a boo-boo configuring openssh.

Also, more resources for security settings:

https://benchmarks.cisecurity.org/downloads/multiform/index....

I remembered correctly, someone had already done that: http://lattejed.com/first-five-and-a-half-minutes-on-a-serve...

Shameless plug: a small side project I did with my team at nodeSWAT [1]: CMify [2] - a web service to easily generate your ansible playbooks. Somewhat naive so far, if there is interest we'll extend it.

[1] http://nodeswat.com [2] https://cmify.com

Don't mind me, I'll just wait here till you're ready.

Please do.

I'd like a copy of that playbook too :-), publish it somewhere?

Please!

Give us your address so we can send you money.

yes please

ditto

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