Hi,

I am about to order a dedicated server and was wondering what needs doing to it before moving my domains onto it?

I am going to be getting WHM and CPanel and its a Linux box.

Are there any bits of software, patches etc. that i definately must put on? I want to be able to monitor bandwidth and want my server to run as quick as possible and use as little bandwidth as possible. I also want my server to be secure and as "unhackable" as possible.

For information I am getting either PIII 866 or PIII 1000 with 512mb RAM and 60gb HDD.

Your help would be greatly appreciated.

That Cpanel/WHM software, runs on 6.2 currently (and only), as far as I know. You will need to do a lot of things on any new server, especially a RH 6.2 system that's been out for so long with so many known exploits. You'll have to install patches, upgrades, etc. You'll have to configure the system, set different ownership and permissions. You'll have to disable certain services and tools. You'll have to do certain other things, depending on what you want or need or plan to run on the server, such as BIND, email service, etc.
You might need to do some chrooting for named, if you run that, just for one measly example. Also, if you are going to have users on this system as a shared host server, you're going to need to do a lot more. No matter what, you have a _lot_ to do, and if you are going to run certain tools or services and if you are going to have users on the system you're going to have to do a _lot_ more on top of that if you want to have it be pretty secure. It wouldn't be possible to name most or even a portion of the process required, but it's only knowledge and time that would hold you back.

I would highly suggest getting a copy of nmap (over at insecure.org I believe) and running it on the ip of the server. To install it...
Download the software
tar zxvf nmap<whatever here>.tar.gz
./configure
make
(optionally if you'd like to allow all users access to nmap) su root - then make install


then to actually use the software you'd want to just do nmap 127.0.0.1 that will spit out a list of open ports. Somethings you obviously want there (22 for ssh, 80 for apache, 82 if your running apache secure, yada) things like telnet, rlogin, time... etc you'd probably want to close off. To turn these things off you can edit your inetd.conf (i'm pretty sure rh 6.2 still uses this, anyone want to confirm this?) and reboot. You have to be really careful to leave your self a way back into the machine.

*disclaimer* I'm not a professional sys-admin, just a linux user for a couple of years now. I threw the above together in a couple of minutes so I may of forgot a couple of big things. If you have any questions feel free to post on the board and I'm sure someone can help you out.