My $0.11 Computer: Newservers.com

Just for fun (and professional development) I leased a server from a company called Newservers.com that market themselves as a "bare metal cloud". Within 15 minutes, I had an account on a physical Dell 1955 machine running Linux. The funky part, is that they claim they only charge $0.11 per hour while the box is powered on. Oddly, this does not seem to be a VM. Here's what we got:

[root@server1868 ~]# cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS release 5.3 (Final)
[root@server1868 ~]# head -1 /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 1026612 kB
[root@server1868 ~]# grep "model name" /proc/cpuinfo
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.80GHz
[root@server ~]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 36.4 GB, 36420075008 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4427 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 3824 30716248+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 3825 4085 2096482+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
[root@server ~]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 29G 1.7G 26G 7% /
tmpfs 502M 0 502M 0% /dev/shm

It's a little bloated. Let's lighten the load:

[root@server rc3.d]# for J in kudzu portmap nfslock mdmonitor rpcidmapd rpcgssd bluetooth netfs pcscd autofs yum-cron cups gpm anacron atd yum-updatesd ; do chkconfig $J off; done

And start to secure this puppy:

[root@server ~]# sed -i "s/=disabled/=permissive/" /etc/sysconfig/selinux
[root@server ~]# touch /.autorelabel
[root@server ~]# vi /etc/hosts.deny     # ALL : ALL
[root@server ~]# vi /etc/hosts.allow     # sshd : safe.location
[root@server ~]# vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config     # PermitRootLogin no
[root@server ~]# useradd blah blah blah -G wheel     # unpriv user in wheel group
[root@server ~]# passwd yada yada yada     # strong password
[root@server ~]# visudo     # enable wheel

Cool. Now lets see where this takes us.