Is it possible at all to have apache running, permit http, https and dns services in Guarddog, open some ports, and yet resist trojans, US militaries etc. from breaking into my PC and use weapons of little or mass distruction?

I run trojans check and see: port 80 - open - possible trojans : Executor, RingZero.

??

Not really. As long as you keep up to date with the newest package versions you should be fine. Opening up ports is like unlocking your door.

Are you worried that the US military is going to break into your PC or is US military a trojan name?

Dear Crashed_Again,

You taught me HOWTO, and I did set up my web-server. Thanks.
The next thing to do is to configure properly Perl, PHP, MySQL and lots of other little things. Unfortunately my website uses all these.

I run sec.check, and, well, sec.check warns - this and that is open to an attack. How dangerous are all these possible threats? Are they layd thick by Norton, McAfee etc?

My system has all the fixes in place. I have a Guarddog, but no antivirus nor trojan blocks similar to Norton. Hope the dog blocks the trojans.

Somewhere on the CD I got Kavspersky (.sic) antivirus. I have not studied its application yet.

Regards, l

Well its my understanding that the reason that new versions of these packages are released is to deal with known vulnerabilities. Microsoft has patches but it seems that we just fix the old package and update to the new one.

As for viruses, well thats not really a big issue in Linux. The nature of the filesystem helps against making viruses for Linux. That said, I myself downloaded the free version of f-prot and run the occasional scan(okay once a day...I'm paranoid).

I could be wrong though. There may be an all powerfull application that can guard against these trojans but if there is I've never heard of it.

You are at all probability right. At least that's what I learnt from others and LQ.

Now my home is /var/www/html
Should it better be /home/username/public_html and apache listen on port, say, 8001?

No the default settings are fine. A good thing to do is to put /var on a sererate partition. That way if you get any sort of Denial of Service attack it will just fill up that partition and not the entire disk. Also if you change apache to listen on port 8001 then people will have to speficy that in there browsers:

http://www.fakedomain.com:8001

Kink of a pain I think.

Thanks for a good advise. One never stops learning specially when just started.