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Debian Server Essentials: Setup, Configure, and Hardening Your System

I am back with another published article.

r/selfhosted - Ideogram.ai: penguin in a server room covered in ice and snow, whole picture made out of green matrix style lines of code, cinematic
Ideogram.ai: penguin in a server room covered in ice and snow, whole picture made out of green matrix style lines of code, cinematic

Please be kind! I am a self-taught Linux user and by no means an expert. My goal with this guide is to help newcomers to Linux have an easier and more secure start.

To all the experts out there, please be kind and do share your tips and observations. I am happy to keep updating the article to make the self-hosting world more secure.

https://nerdyarticles.com/debian-server-essentials-setup-configure-and-hardening-your-system/

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Nice work!

Some small pieces of feedback:

  • You can disable the root user during installation, by leaving the root password blank. The installer explains this in the text at the top of the page. If you do this, root will be disabled and sudo will be installed automatically

  • If you really want to control which users can SSH in, it's recommended to create a group and use AllowGroups, rather than allowing individual users via AllowUsers. Note that once you disable PasswordAuthentication, the only users that can SSH in are users that have keys in authorized_keys, so you don't really need to use AllowUsers or AllowGroups.

  • Disabling IPv6 is unnecessary. If you don't want to use it, then just... don't use it? You should ideally always have IPv6 enabled for connections to the internet though. It's generally faster due to better routing (see Google's latency impact data: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption), and more future-proof.

  • You may want to consider CrowdSec instead of fail2ban. It's more efficient and they have a shared list of known bad IPs that you can use.

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Thanks for the feedback man! Save your comment and will go through it in a couple of days.

I know that setting the AllowUser and only allowing keys in combination is not really needed, but I thought "what's the harm"... But for the guide I might adjust that part.

On IPv6... My "research" was done quite a while ago... So not 100% sure anymore about the reasoning, but I what annoyed me most is the two rules in the firewall I had to delete when playing around. But I'll do some reading and update the guide accordingly.

Crowdsec is on my todo list! So much want to integrate it in quite a few areas, just haven't found the time to wrap my head around it yet.

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Mozilla has some guidelines for SSH which I use: https://infosec.mozilla.org/guidelines/openssh

Only thing I do differently is I use ed25519 instead of RSA. 

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -a 100
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Thanks!

I saw the ed25519 keys sometime ago, but haven’t had time to understand it.

Will look into it and the link!

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Another great article! I'm curious about the reasoning for using Debian on a Pi vs the Pi OS which is based off Debian?

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For Raspberry Pi's I prefer DietPi which is Debian based but not full of unnecessary stuff for servers like Pi OS is.

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This is a comprehensive linux server hardening guide. Check it out!

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Damn, I was legit spinning up a new Ubuntu server VM and thought I'm gonna look up a guide about proper initial config/hardening while it loads up ... You convinced me to give debian a go.

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Nice timing! Happy you found it exactly when you needed it

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