We use Ubuntu here , but by now I can'tsay that we're exactly fond of it. At this point we're using it notbecause we like it but because we lack a better alternative, whichgives me a somewhat jaundiced perspective.

A disclaimer: this is about Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake, the LTS releasethat will be supported for a long time). Moving to more recent Ubuntureleases is not an option for us, because we need longer support periodsthan 1

Here's something important for file ownership on web servers:

The user that the web server runs as should not own anything that the webserver serves.

This means that the web server's user shouldn't own anything under thedocument root or in CGI areas, and there shouldn't be any writeabledirectories under either that it can use to put things in. Stronglyresist the temptation to have CGIs write data files under the CGI areaor in the docroot, even if they are normally blocked from being

For a long time, whenever we installed systems we didn't bother to beterribly specific about where they were located, which generally comesup when you get asked about time zones. For example, a lot of thingsdefault to 'America/New York', and since that's in the Eastern timezone a lot of the time we said 'sure, whatever' and went on.

The recent American DST rule change illustrates that this is nowhazardous; it is now important to actually be specific about

Many years ago, I went to a talk about a new object oriented operatingsystem (a research project, obviously). The presenter made a big dealabout how everything in, eg, their filesystem was an object, and sothings were very general and you could put anything in the directoryobjects, and as they went on I noticed something disturbing: while youcould put all those different things into directories, none of themseemed to have the same set of methods; in fact, the methods wereoften significantly