Welcome!

I'll try and put some info in here that new users unfamiliar with Linux may find useful. If there's anything else, just yell.

The machine: auron.zyloid.com

The machine itself is a virtual machine; i.e. it's sharing its hardware with three other machines. Still, it's a dual 1.4GHz Athlon with 1Gb of RAM and 120Gb of mirrored data space, so even a quarter of that isn't bad. My virtual machine is running Debian Linux (Testing release) on a 2.6.11 kernel, and I've installed various services that you can make use of. If there's anything else that you want installed just shout; there's Debian packages for just about everything.

Obviously I make no guarantees as to the availability of the machine or the safety of any data you put on there, but I'll do my best to keep it operational all of the time (it's in my interests after all, since my mail is hosted on there too).

Accessing the machine

The machine runs an SSH server, which is effectively a secure version of telnet, on port 22 (the standard SSH port). Here you can log in with your username and password using a program such as PuTTY, and use a bash shell to work on the server. Some useful commands are given below:

cat <filename>display the contents of <filename>
cdmove to your home directory
cd <directory>move to <directory>
chmod <file/dir>change permissions of file/directory
chmod -R <dir>recursively change permissions of directory
cp <src> <dest>copy <src> file to <dest>
lslist contents of a directory
ls -allist contents of a directory in long format
man <command>display the manual page for <command> (very useful!)
mv <src> <dest>move <src> file to <dest>
nano <file>use simple text editor to modify <file>
passwdchange your password
vi <file>use scarier text editor to modify <file>

The machine does *not* run a generally accessible FTP server because FTP is inherently insecure (your password is sent in plaintext!). Instead you can copy files over SSH using a program called SCP. A Windows client for this with a nice GUI interface, WinSCP, can be found here. Use this to transfer files between your own machine and your filespace on the server.

Your home directory is located in /home/<username>, and is where all your files are stored. You can put whatever you like in there (within reason). Two directories that should exist the first time you log in are Maildir and public_html; these relate to your email account and web space respectively.

Security

For the time being files you create will be world readable by default (your email is the exception, being non world-readable). I may change my mind on this but for the time being if you don't want a file/directory to be readable by anyone but yourself you need to change it manually. You can check the current permissions of a file/directory using 'ls -al'; a useful guide to permissions is given here.

I've attached an SSL certificate to this email which you can install so you don't get prodded by constant annoying dialogs when attempting to use Secure IMAP or webmail. Save it to disk, then right-click on it and select 'Install'. Click Next through the dialogs, a dialog should appear asking if you're absolutely certain you want to install this as a root certificate. Click 'Yes'.

Note about stored files

Please don't store anything illegal on the server. By this I mean music, movies, war3z, cr4ckz, pr0n etc. etc, you get the idea. I'm fairly flexible about how much legal stuff you store on there until I start running out of disk space, but publically available dodgy stuff will be noticed and summarily removed. There are two reasons for this: 1) I'm sharing this server with other people, so if legal people start coming after me there's a good chance they'll be going after them too, and 2) I have to pay for bandwidth, and turning the machine into Steve's l33t MP3 server is not going to help matters.

Email - mail.zyloid.com

The server runs the open source Courier mail management software. By default you will have been given the email address <username>@zyloid.com, and you can request additional ones if you want them. There are two options as to how you use mail on the server:

1. Host mail on the machine. This option holds all the email to that address on the server, which means you can access it from anywhere using the Secure IMAP or webmail methods described later on. However, this does mean that your emails are sitting on a computer I have root access to, and so theoretically I can read your mail. I won't, and of course the same applies to whoever else you use to host your mail, but it's something you should be aware of. You can use encryption packages such as PGP or GnuPG to prevent unauthorised access to your email if you desire totally confidential email. Alternatively you can download all messages to your machine and delete them from the server should you wish, but this removes the benefit of centrally accessible mail. If this is what you want though then let me know and I'll turn on the POP mail server which better facilitates this.

2. Forward mail from that address to another account. This option bounces all mail to another address selected by you. To activate forwarding use nano or vi to create a file called '.forward' in your home directory; then place the email address(es) you wish mail to be forwarded to on separate lines in that file. You can turn off forwarding at a later date by renaming or removing this file.

Assuming you go with the first option you have two methods of accessing your mail, IMAP and webmail. IMAP is useful with clients such as Thunderbird and Outlook Express, whilst webmail is handy if you have no email client software to hand (e.g. at a public machine).

To set up a Secure IMAP account in Thunderbird, do the following:

  1. Tools, Account Settings
  2. Click 'Add Account'
  3. Select 'Email account', click Next
  4. Enter your name and email address in the appropriate boxes, and click Next
  5. Select the IMAP radio button. Enter mail.zyloid.com as the Incoming Server. Click Next
  6. Enter your username into Incoming User Name, and click Next
  7. Give the account an appropriate name (e.g. 'Zyloid'), and click Next
  8. Click Finish
  9. Find the new account in the Account Settings window, and select Server Settings
  10. Check 'Use secure connection' (SSL)
  11. Click 'Advanced'
  12. Enter INBOX as the IMAP server directory, and click OK
  13. Select 'Outgoing Server (SMTP)' in the Account Settings window
  14. Enter mail.zyloid.com as the Server Name, and check 'Use name and password'
  15. Select the 'TLS' radio button, and click OK
  16. Select the Inbox of the account in the main window
  17. Enter your password when prompted, and check the box to save it in the Password Manager if you wish
  18. You may be prompted about the certificate, tell it to always accept it.

To set up a Secure IMAP account in Outlook Express (the instructions are very similar for Outlook), do the following:

  1. Tools, Accounts
  2. Click 'Add Mail'
  3. Enter your name, click Next
  4. Enter your email address (@zyloid.com), click Next
  5. Select IMAP from the dropdown. Enter mail.zyloid.com as the incoming mail server and outgoing SMTP server. Click Next.
  6. Enter your username and password. Leave secure password authentication unchecked.
  7. Click Finish
  8. Click on the newly created account, and click Properties
  9. Enter a name for the account (e.g. Zyloid)
  10. Select the Advanced tab
  11. Check both of the 'This server requires a secure connection (SSL)' boxes
  12. Select the IMAP tab
  13. Enter INBOX as the root folder path
  14. Click OK, then Close
  15. Click 'Yes' when asked if you wish to download new folders
  16. You need to install Zyloid's SSL certificate to stop Outlook Express complaining about the server not being trusted. Click the link above, then Open, then Install Certificate and follow the instructions.

That should be it!

To access your webmail from the internet simply navigate to mail.zyloid.com; this should take you to the webmail front end from where you can log in with your default username and password. You may get a certificate error if you're on a machine you haven't installed the certificate on (I'm too cheap to pay for one to be validated); just okay the dialog away.

Web space - www.zyloid.com

The server runs Apache, with extensions for PHP (a dynamic server-side scripting engine). Files you create in /home/<username>/public_html/ will be available at http://www.zyloid.com/~<username>. If you want I can update the DNS so you can have http://<something>.zyloid.com/ too; this takes a while to propagate through DNS though and I don't do it by default, so you'll have to ask. By default Apache looks for an index.html file before giving a listing of the files in the directory, so that's a good starting point if you want to create a web-site.

That's it

Well thanks for reading this all the way to the end, and damn you all the way to Hades if you didn't. Anyway, have fun, play around - it shouldn't be possible to break anything unless I've set something up wrong so feel free to experiment. If you do notice any gaping security flaws I'd prefer it if you mentioned them to me rather than exploited them, obviously :-)

Cheers,

Steve