My Slicehost server setup

I set up a new slice today using the following steps, most of which have I got from these three articles.

I use Ubuntu Gutsy on my servers. This setup gets me to the stage where I can deploy rails apps (which will be the topic of another post). Note that user specific values are preceded by the dollar sign, so for example I would replace $USERNAME with ciaran.

Log in as root
Add universe and multiverse repos to the ubuntu archives in /etc/apt/sources.list
Update packages
```
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
```
Change root password (I use pwgen to create passwords) by running ‘passwd’ as root

Change default text editor to vim by running

update-alternatives --set editor /usr/bin/vim.basic

Add a standard user:
```
adduser $USERNAME
```
Allow standard user to use sudo to run commands as root by adding the following line to the end of the text file that is opened when ‘visudo’ is run as root:
```
$USERNAME  ALL=(ALL) ALL
```
Switch to the non-root user
Copy public key from my workstation to the server:
```
scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub $USERNAME@$SERVER_IP:
```
Then on the server add it to the /home/$USERNAME/.ssh/authorized_keys file:
```
cat id_dsa.pub >>.ssh/authorized_keys
```
Log in to the server as the non-root user, there should be no password authentication now that the public key has been authorized
Disable root login over ssh, and disallow password logins, among other things, by making sure the following lines exists in /etc/ssh/sshd_config:
```
PermitRootLogin no
PasswordAuthentication no
X11Forwarding no
UsePAM no
UseDNS no
AllowUsers $USERNAME
```
Restart the ssh server:
```
sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart
```
Install rails + dependencies. I wouldn’t actually use the ubuntu rails package, but if you install it it pulls in some dependencies which are useful.
```
sudo apt-get install rails libopenssl-ruby \
  libopenssl-ruby1.8 ri1.8 ruby1.8-dev \
  build-essential zip unzip
```

Install mysql + extras (set the root mysql password while you are at it!)

sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client \
  libmysqlclient15-dev libmysql-ruby

If you don’t want to use InnoDB then edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf, and uncomment the following line:
```
#skip-innodb
```
Restart mysql
```
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart
```
Download and install rubygems, then symlink gem1.8 to gem:
```
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem
```
Symlink irb1.8 to irb:
```
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/irb1.8 /usr/bin/irb
```
Install git
```
sudo apt-get install git-svn
```

Install ssmtp then edit the config file as follows:

root=$GMAIL_USERNAME@gmail.com
mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
AuthUser=$GMAIL_USERNAME@gmail.com
AuthPass=$GMAIL_PASSWORD
rewriteDomain=gmail.com
UseSTARTTLS=YES
hostname=$HOSTNAME
FromLineOverride=YES