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Re: Looking for Advice on Debian Server Setup



In <[🔎] da77481d0904270627k4dfa0672ke7ff0ba41cc581cb@mail.gmail.com>, Mark 
Phillips wrote:
>I am setting up a new server for Plone/Zope sites on a Linode VPS. Reading
>the "Securing Debian Manual" (http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-
>debian-howto/), it recommends separate partitions for /tmp, /home, /opt, and
>/var. I was talking with some of the Linode folks on IRC to find out how to
>set up separate partitions, and they felt that it was unnecessary to have
>separate partitions for a production server (regardless if it is on Linode
>or not).

For security reasons, /tmp, /home, /var/tmp, and anywhere else a normal user 
can create new files should be a separate mount point so that you can use 
mount options nosuid, nodev, and possibly noexec.  But, that's really only 
required if you are giving users shell accounts (even if they are restricted 
shells like sftp-only).

I prefer /var (and /srv if you use it) as (a) separate mount point(s) so that 
an out-of-control process that is writing to a log file or similar will not 
run / out of space, which can prevent root from being able to ssh in.  It 
doesn't completely prevent bad things from locking you out of the system, but 
it can help.

If you can isolate all writes to the separate mount points above, it also 
allows you to use the ro mount option for other mount points, which can 
protect you from packaging accidents where directories are left writable to 
non-root users when they shouldn't be.
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