I would like to see a HowTo on maintaining a server... Okay, I am basically a newb myself. Despite the fact that for some insane reason it states "senior member" below my name in the posts, and despite the fact that I have been running (or better yet let run...) a server for some years now, I really know nothing about day-to-day operations and checks that should be done. I am sure that like me, many jumped in this with both feet and migrating from Windows to Linux is not the easiest jump. I am still GUI dependent but I would like to become more command line oriented eventually. While I have read, and read, mass quantities of linux material I am a visual learner so that has made it more difficult to read (actually understand...) a lot of what I have read. What logs should we check... where are they... what should we look for... How do we tell if we are getting attacked... what can we do... How do we tell if someone is using our mail for spam... how do we stop them...
Most logs are in the /var/log directory (and its subdirectories). http://www.howtoforge.com/faq/1_38_en.html http://www.howtoforge.com/taxonomy_menu/1/59 Take a look at the mail log and the mail queue ( Code: postqueue -p ), and set up Postfix monitoring.
Thanks... in my previous (lol at the moment current also) setup I always seemed to have a problem locating the proftp logs. They were/are not in /var/log/... Logs... what are we looking at or for... I did find some good info when I was looking at the php issue in the suse10.2 setup I had problems with. It talked about the error numbers but according to the log everything was fine and no indication anyone was or would experience problems opening .php pages on my sites. I will take a look at the links and see what I can learn! thanks again... A server "checklist" which I think would probably universal regardless of OS would still be good. Help us newbs learn get into a routine of checking.
