DirectAdmin is one of the mostly used Hosting Control Panels around, for single server installations it is easy to setup and start selling hosting busines, some advantages of DirectAdmin are;
- Easy to install, can be installed on a VPS or VDS also
- Less overhead, minimal code
- Easy to maintain & upgrade
- Easy to modify wtihout breking the continuity
- Huge fans and great forum that you can find your solutions
Operating System Setup (RedHat Enterprise Linux, CentOS or CloudLinux is recomended)
In order to make your system more secure to attacks, trojans and backdoors you should make a seprate partition for /tmp and restrict execute rights for all users. size between 4 to 6 GB is enough for the /tmp partition. Follow our directives on howto make tmp partition more secure in Linux Security Documents and disable execute permissions in /etc/fstab.
For more secure installation do not blindly install default packages or any Desktop environment. You should remove all selected groups and belonging packages from the installation, be aware that CentOS could be installed with the first CD, if the setup asks for additional CDs, you most probably forgot to uncheck some packages. With this method you should only need the first CD of CentOS distro.
We recommend using YUM as an updater/package installer for Linux.
Close firewall with CHKCONFIG
You might enable it after installing DirectAdmin or you should better install csf
chkconfig iptables off
chkconfig ip6tables offservice iptables stop
service ip6tables stop
Disable SELINUX
SELINUX is enabled default in LINUX and if you don’t disable or modify you cannot access some of the services from the outside such as httpd (apache). Open the config file with the following command:
sed -i ‘s/SELINUX=.*/SELINUX=disabled/’ /etc/sysconfig/selinux
/usr/sbin/setenforce 0
Install Prerequisities & Updates:
DirectAdmin requires some additional packages before entering the setup. Use YUM to upgrade your system:
yum upgrade -y
Install additional packages required by DirectAdmin:
CentOS 5.x #yum install gcc gcc-c++ make vixie-cron flex wget quota perl gd
CentOS 6.x #yum install gcc gcc-c++ flex bison make bind bind-libs bind-utils openssl openssl-devel perl quota libaio libcom_err-devel libcurl-dev which bc wget gd
If you get a conflict error with perl, perl was already installed before, please remove it from the above code and re-try.
Set hostname to “mail.yourservername.tld” before starting setup, using mail. saves you from confusions & mail transmission problems:
hostname mail.yourserver.tld
Go to step two: DirectAdmin Setup