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Hiawatha & VPS

Gour
29 October 2014, 16:14
Hello,

after (too) long fiddling with shared hosting and their buggy reverse-proxy (Nginx), I've decided to try with VPS at Linode to put Hiawatha at the front.

However, this means that Hiawatha is now at the front-line, so I wonder if you can give some general hint(s) how to make it secure or are the defaults pretty good ones to start with?

Next step is to install Monitor and have insight what's going on the battlefield.

Hiawatha version: 9.8
Operating System: Debian Wheezy
Hugo Leisink
30 October 2014, 07:34
Hiawatha at the frontline, that's where it should be and that's where it serves best. Congratulations on this wise decision!

The default values are good to start with. I don't know what kind of website you're hosting or the kind of environment your server is in. But I strongly advice to read the manual page, go through all the options to get an idea of what Hiawatha can do for you and keep them in mind for situations that might occur later.

The Hiawatha Monitor is a good way to keep track of the health and performance of your server and websites. Note that it's not for security monitoring only or to replace analytics software, but it's a tool to give you a general idea of what's going on at your server. It gives pointers to what log file to look at for details.
samiux
30 October 2014, 10:36
@Gour,

Basically, Hiawatha is very secure by default. However, it is a good idea to make it stronger. To do this, I will set it up like this :

HOWTO : Highest secured Hiawatha Web Server 9.8 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Server [secure-ubuntu-server.blogspot.com]

Gour
30 October 2014, 22:09
Hiawatha at the frontline, that's where it should be and that's where it serves best. Congratulations on this wise decision!

Well, I must say that the only 'cons' was mail server, but I'm ready to wrestle with it.

Otherwise, for me, Hiawatha means three things:


  • Simple - the configuaration format is simplicity personified and very pleasant to work with in comparison with all the other well-known webservers.
  • Ssecure - no need to speak how Hiawatha is much more secure than others
  • Fast - although one would expect there would be some trade-off like speed vs security, there is none. \


Sqlite has motto: "Small. Fast. Reliable. Choose any three."

The one for Hiawatha is: "Simple. Secure. Fast. Choose them all!"

I don't know what kind of website you're hosting or the kind of environment your server is in.

I'll host few instance of PHP CMS - Tiki on 1G Linode VPS.

But I strongly advice to read the manual page, go through all the options to get an idea of what Hiawatha can do for you and keep them in mind for situations that might occur later.

OK, will do. Tomorrow I plan to tackle mail server...

The Hiawatha Monitor is a good way to keep track of the health and performance of your server and websites. Note that it's not for security monitoring only or to replace analytics software, but it's a tool to give you a general idea of what's going on at your server. It gives pointers to what log file to look at for details.

I did install Monitor and it is very cute tool. For analytics I use Piwik.
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