Preparing a new CentOS 6 Server

These are some reminders to myself, to apply my personal preferences when installing a new server based on CentOS 6.

  1. Make booting verbose, remove the portion rgbh quiet from the kernel line in /boot/grub/grub.conf.

  2. Install misc tools:

    yum -y install vim
yum -y install wget
yum -y install mlocate
yum -y install iptraf
yum -y install iotraf
yum -y install man
yum -y install nmap

  3. CRON Configuration: Sometimes fresh Minimal CentOS installations don't come with Cron pre-installed. In such a case: 

    yum -y install cronie cronie-anacron crontabs

    Then activate and enable the service:

    chkconfig crond on
service crond start

  4. SNMP Configuration:

    yum -y install net-snmp
chkconfig snmpd on

    In /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf change the community to something other than the default public, for example change the line:

    com2sec notConfigUser  default       public

    To something like:

    com2sec notConfigUser  default       My_pr1vate_c0mmunity

    Also, if you are using an NMS like Zenoss that can poll all sorts of information from the device via SNMP, you can greatly expand the range of data available with commenting out the following two lines...

    view    systemview    included   .1.3.6.1.2.1.1
view    systemview    included   .1.3.6.1.2.1.25.1.1

    ...and substituting them with:

    view    systemview    included   .1

  5. Disable console blanking by editing /boot/grub/grub.conf and adding the following at the end of the kernel line:

    consoleblank=0

Sources

Posted on