Generic Configuration README

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https://fishilico.github.io/generic-config/

Overview

This project aims to give a quick technical perspective of the configuration files I need to modify to get a system which fits my needs in terms of security and usability.

Disclaimer

This project is NOT intended to be a tutorial or a reference for anyone else. There is absolutely NO WARRANTY for the content of this project to give you a safe and usable configuration. Please consider this files as a cheat-sheet or as some kind of last resort documentation to be looking for when you really do not know how to configure a piece of software.

History

Whenever I install a new Linux machine there are config files that need to be edited. For example, on a server it’s a good idea to disable remote root login after an administrator account has been created. Another example happens when a desktop computer needs a basic firewall (only to prevent for this computer from being open to the four winds): which rules should I configure?

At first I’ve written some text files and memos to keep track of these things. However, system administration of a few personal hosts (servers and desktop workstations) becomes really hard when you have not got a way to keep configuration “in sync with your mind”.

Another issue occurred several years ago. One of my friends who was new to IPv6 wanted to know what rules I was using in the ip6tables firewall of my server. I gave him a kind of “anonymized file” with rules which were not specific to my server and he found out that there were some problems with IPv6 fragmentation. Therefore I needed to add some rules and to update the firewall of every host I had.

So I’ve started my Generic Configuration project to create a place where I could write down the non-specific files I can show to my friends and to other people. In order to promote getting feedback from my notes, I made this project public, with a Git tree hosted by GitHub. Nowadays the HTML pages are hosted by GitHub Pages, and a Circle-Ci job has been configured to rebuild the pages every time branch master is updated.

When you are reading the files I’ve written, please keep in mind that no host in the world would run with only the things I describe, as they most likely require some slight customization from their sysadmins.

Finally, I use a version control system (Git) to ease the way people can contribute to this project. So if you find a bug and fill an issue or a pull request to help me improve this project, what would be really nice! The project is located on https://github.com/fishilico/generic-config.

Structure

This project is organized in folders by field:

  • etc/: common files in /etc folder which are in every host

  • etc-desktop/: desktop-specific configuration of some /etc files

  • etc-server/: config files of services which can be found on a server

  • sysadmin/: some thoughts and tips&tricks about system administration

  • windows/: content related to using Microsoft Windows systems

  • www/: content of /var/www on a web server without specific purpose

License

This project is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International (CC-BY-SA-4.0).