Provisioning a file hosting server ==================================== Create the ssh authorized keys file. Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and change PermitRootLogin to without-password. Restart sshd. apt-get install vim nginx zsh python-lxml python-mechanize iotop htop smartmontools chsh -s /bin/zsh mkdir -p /root/staging /root/work/vim /srv/download /srv/manual scp .zshrc .vimrc server: scp -r ~/work/vim/zsh-syntax-highlighting server:work/vim If the server has a backup hard-disk, mount it at /mnt/backup and edit /etc/fstab so that it is auto-mounted. Then, add the following to crontab @daily /usr/bin/rsync -ha /srv /mnt/backup @daily /usr/bin/rsync -ha /etc /mnt/backup Nginx ------ Copy over /etc/nginx/sites-available/default from another file server. When copying, remember to use cat instead of cp to preserve hardlinks (the file is a hardlink to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default) rsync /srv from another file server service nginx start