• Operating System Setup (RedHat Enterprise Linux, CentOS or CloudLinux is recomended)

In order to make your system more secure to attacks, trojans and backdoors you should make a seprate partition for /tmp and restrict execute rights for all users. size between 4 to 6 GB is enough for the /tmp partition. Follow our directives on howto make tmp partition more secure in Linux Security Documents and disable execute permissions in /etc/fstab.

For more secure installation do not blindly install default packages or any Desktop environment. You should remove all selected groups and belonging packages from the installation, be aware that CentOS could be installed with the first CD, if the setup asks for additional CDs, you most probably forgot to uncheck some packages. With this method you should only need the first CD of CentOS distro.

After rebooting follow the steps below:

We recommend using YUM as an updater/package installer for Linux.

• Close firewall with CHKCONFIG

• Disable SELINUX

SELINUX is enabled default in LINUX and if you don't disable or modify you cannot access some of the services from the outside such as httpd (apache). Open the config file with the following command:

to swith the vi editor to INSERT mode press Insert button or the key "i": change the line "SELINUX=enforcing" to "SELINUX=disabled" and press ESC button and SHIFT+ZZ to save and quit. Note that the SELINUX is still active until you reboot your box. To disable SELINUX without restarting write the command:

• Install Prerequisities:

DirectAdmin requires some additional packages before entering the setup. Use YUM to upgrade your system:

Install additional packages required by DirectAdmin:

set hostname to mail.yourservername.tld before starting setup, using mail. saves you from some mail transmission problems:

1. Setp Two: DirectAdmin Setup
2. Step Three: DirectAdmin User Interface

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