My first public website - how to secure it for use?

[Chris Petrovitch]

Gerard Seibert wrote:

>On Wed, 21 Sep 2005 11:18:18 -0700, Derrill Guilbert <derrill at gmail.com>
>Subject: My first public website - how to secure it for use?
>Wrote these words of wisdom:
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>>I am grateful for all the assistance I've received to date from this 
>>list ... I'm going through a bunch of baptism by fire stuff on FreeBSD - 
>>I've used it for basic file sharing, intranet stuff, EASY stuff before. 
>>Now, however, I keep getting asked for more robust things.
>>
>>We have been having some ... disagreements with our webhost. Basically, 
>>we want him to enable password protection on a site, and he doesn't want 
>>to figure out how to do it. I emailed him everything he needs, but he 
>>can't be arsed, apparently. I even asked him to email me his config file 
>>and I'd update it and send it back - he could then diff it and then 
>>update it based on my changes. What would it be, five lines? 10? It 
>>wouldn't be much, based on apache's site. Still, no response.
>>
>>Because of our unique relationship with him, my boss feels like the best 
>>alternative for now would be having me put up a webserver based on 
>>FreeBSD. It'll need PHP and MySQL, which I think I can figure out.
>>
>>I've run apache sites before - 1996 - 2000 I was part of the IT staff of 
>>a small website building/hosting company. However, I've never set a box 
>>up for internet use myself, and the internet is a vastly different 
>>(read: more hostile) place than it was then. This box is basically going 
>>to be on its own on the internet. Is it enough to run a firewall like pf 
>>and go through the steps outlined at 
>>http://www.bsdguides.org/guides/freebsd/security/harden.php before 
>>putting it up to be assaulted?
>>
>>Derrill
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>***** REPLY SEPARATOR *****
>On 9/21/2005 5:21:43 PM, Gerard Seibert Replied:
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>Are you sure about the URL? I cannot seem to get it to connect.
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hum... it seems http://www.bsdguides.com/ is down?