Hi,

Just signed up for my first server with pwebtech and it should be available within a week.

A few questions for you all....

What do i need to do once the server is handed over to me? ie. patches, programs etc?

Where do i look to keep up to date on new patches, things to install etc?

What should i do/check to the server on a dialy/weekly/monthly basis (except for creating lots of accounts hopefully)?

Any other advice, websites, newsletters etc.

FYI the server is going to be used to host multiple domains and is running CPanel, Linux 7.2

Cheers.

OK, a few things.
First off I would not recomend a new RH for a server. Bugs may be discoverd and patches not ready in time, some people will find your box fun to tamper with. I hear a lot of people prefer 6.2
you can get patches from the red hat site, im not sure of the url, but it shouldnt be too hard to find.
Setup a program to always check on your server, 24/7

When it comes to RedHat, I always stick with the .2 releases, because they are always the most solid releases. My servers run 6.2, and I'm running the 7.2 beta on two home machines (including this laptop), much to my liking so far.

However, he mentions "Linux 7.2", so it's probably not RedHat (I doubt any provider would offer a beta OS unless you specifically requested it). I'm guessing it's probably Mandrake...

I am using three free monitoring services at the moment. That's hardly adequate though because most of these free services only check the server once an hour. But you get what you pay for ;)

http://qwkmon.com/
http://internetseer.com
http://uptime.openacs.org/uptime

OpenACS has been the best so far because it requests a specific HTML file every 15 minutes approx.

You should tell Jason exactly what you need - have a checklist (php, mysql, etc) and he will most likely agree to install whatever you need while he is setting up. He was pretty helpfull with me. Also double check that servers you don't want running are not running - like telnet. Although, again, I was pretty happy to find that Jason had already done this in my case.

Other members in recent threads have suggested keeping up to date with security patches through:
www.Linuxsecurity.com
www.securityfocus.com

All the best :)

the pay version of qwkmon.com is highly worth the money!