Essential Functions of Web Hosting System Administrator

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Web Hosting System Administrator

ananova.com system administrators share security tricks and tips on web hosting network configurations and protection to determine when and where security breaches occurred. A website visitor can find articles on web hosting company reviews, firewall, various country laws, platform security, scanners, sniffers, crackers, spoofing, remote attacks, malware, virus, trojans and many more. The articles, help the web hosting system administrator in managing hosts, checking logs, and applying filters and encryption.

Most businesses look for web hosting servers or virtual private servers, which comes with root account with full unrestricted access of the system.

Functions of Web Hosting System Administrator

The web hosting system administrator setup and maintain users, systems, verify and repair hardware, monitor system, and network performance, create a file system, install software, do backup and recovery, update system and applications and implement the policies. The task also includes maintaining system security by installing and setting up firewalls and intrusion detection systems.

Furthermore, with the advent to cloud technology the web hosting system administrator responsibilities also includes installing and maintaining:

• Cloud infrastructure such as AWS, OpenStack etc.
• Automation software such as puppet, chef, etc.
• Network services in the cloud such as Content delivery networks (Akamai, CloudFront etc) and DNS servers.
• Source control
• Designing best practices for backups, and the whole infrastructure

Tools to Assist Web Hosting System Administrator

The tools to assist in setting up, maintaining and troubleshooting the server.

TCP Wrappers

It provides basic traffic filtering of incoming network traffic.

which sshd

To determine the absolute pathname of the sshd service

ldd /sbin/sshd | grep libwrap

To determine whether a network service is linked to libwrap.a. It displays the lists of shared libraries linked to the sshd services

hosts_access: A system and language for access rules, To allow or deny client access add its hostname or IP address to:

/etc/hosts.allow

A table to hosts accesses and read first from top to bottom and take precedence.

/etc/hosts.deny

A table to hosts denial rules

tcpd – access control facility for internet services

It allows or denies network connections from specified hosts or hierarchies. It is set up to monitor incoming requests for telnet, finger, ftp, exec, rsh, rlogin, tftp, talk, comsat and other services that have a one-to-one mapping onto executable files.

tcpdchk

verifies tcpd-centric configurations

tcpdmatch

interactively demonstrates rules