I have made a quick guide on how to setup a server specifically for MFA sites from start to finish. The server will consist of,

• Web server – Apache
• Database – mySQL
• Scripting Language – PHP
• FTP Daemon – vsFTPD
• DNS Server – Bind

We are going to assume you are using centOS and have yum available. This should only be used on a fresh install. So lets begin,

Installing Services

To make this quick we are just going to use the RPM’s available from the depositories. At the shell prompt execute,


yum -y install httpd httpd-devel mysql mysql-server mysql-devel vsftpd bind bind-libs bind-utils php php-cli


Now that the services are installed it’s time to configure them.

Configure Apache

Depending on which centOS version you are using you will either have apache 1.x (centos4) or apache 2.x (centos5) we are going to assume apache 2.x however as the change are only minor config changes they are the same anyway.

Rather than opening and configuring we will just do a quick replacement on the file for the NameVirtualHost and to include a single file in which we will keep all the vhosts.


perl -pi -e 's/#NameVirtualHost \*:80/NameVirtualHost \*:80\ninclude conf\/domains.conf/g' /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf


This will edit the config for you and if you view the config you should see something like this

Configure DNS

When configuring the DNS we are only going to setup 1 domain which will be the primary nameservers, we will use masterdomain.com as an example throughout. There will not be any domains actually setup other than the primary nameserver domain as these will be setup later with the script we build.

Setup the standard configuration (recreating as centOS 5 does not provide /etc/named.conf)

cat >/etc/named.conf <<EOM
// Default named.conf generated by AdminGeekZ

EOM


Now setup the nameservers we will be using the following for our example,

– ns1.masterdomain.com -> 10.1.1.1
– ns2.masterdomain.com -> 10.2.2.2


cat >/var/named/masterdomain.com.db <<EOM
$TTL 6200
@ 6200 IN SOA ns1.masterdomain.com. server.masterdomain.com. (
2006070312
6200
7200
1419200
6200
)

/etc/init.d/named restart


Now we create a dns zone template, this is for our bulk setup script later.


cat >/etc/template.named <<EOM
$TTL 6200
@ 6200 IN SOA ns1.cdomain.com. server.cdomain.com. (
2006070312
6200
7200
1419200
6200
)

cdomain.com. 6200 IN A 10.1.1.1
EOM


Your /etc/named.conf should look something like this now,

That’s all that is required for this section of bind now.

Setting up FTP/SSH Account

For ease of use we will have all domains managed by one FTP account of the username node which accesses /home/httpd/domains


mkdir -p /home/httpd/domains
adduser -d /home/httpd/domains node
echo "my??password12" | passwd node --stdin


You will have to chown and chmod this directory later for extra security.

Creating Setup Script

We will now use a script which can be used to add domains easily, this will use the base we already setup earlier.

The Script

cat >/root/setup.sh <<EOF
#!/bin/bash

EOF
chmod 700 /root/setup.sh


That’s the script created and to add a domain you simply run

/root/setup.sh domain.com

Bulk Adding Domains

Now that everything is setup and ready the last part is to bulk add all of your domains. To do this we are going to have them in a list (without www.) so have a file called domains.txt which should look something like this,

google.com
msn.com
yahoo.com

When you have your list and want to setup the domains first comment out the apache and named reload lines from the /root/setup.sh script to make this go much faster (you can reload once completed) and then loop through the domains by using something like this,


for i in `cat domains.txt`;do /root/setup.sh $i;done


Once completed reload named and apache


/etc/init.d/named reload
/etc/init.d/apache reload


Final Touches

Now that your server is setup and you can add domains easily the last thing to do is to start all the services and make sure they start on boot. You may wish to optimize the server aswell as any other misc tweaks (Such as adding index.php to the DirectoryIndex).


/etc/init.d/httpd restart
/etc/init.d/mysqld restart
/etc/init.d/vsftpd restart
/etc/init.d/named restart
chkconfig httpd on
chkconfig mysqld on
chkconfig vsftpd on
chkconfig named on


Summary

We setup the following,

• 3 Domains (google.com/msn.com/yahoo.com) for both dns and web
• A master FTP account (username: node / password: my??password12)
• 1 master nameserver (masterdomain.com) which all domains use

If you followed this from start to finish you should now have a fully working server for your MFA sites where you can add new domains easily and manage all the domains from one account.