I hope everyone considers this the correct forum I was in two minds as to where to post it....


I wish to setup a secure web server that will have very little change (if any) once setup. It will basically be serving content from another box.

To ensure that there is as little as possible that can go wrong I thought about running a single boot cd distro running the web server. Now obviously the http.conf, ssl key & certificate as well as any authentication will need to be altered (and preferable burnt onto the CD).

Best case senario for me I guess would be to setup a machine and then "image" the install to CD. If anything went wrong a simple reboot would set everything back to the original state. Any attempt to hack the machine could be quite humorous as you would be unable to edit files, perminatley anyway ;p.

Has anyone done this? Any pointers?

Thanks in advance.

You can try a customized Knoppix variation such as Echelon or LivePlone.

Peruse more Knoppix customizations at knoppix.net

You can take a distribution from a hard-disk and with a little modifacation make it so that it can be made into a cd-image to be burnt. Eagle-linux has very good directions for this sort of thing. With a little bit of imagination, you should be able to modify directions found http://eaglelinux.w32.net/v2_2CDHowto.pdf so that it's exactly what you want.

Came across a bootable, CD-based, security distro called Sentinix.

Check out www.distrowatch.com . They have a whole section on CD-based distros.

How to make a bootable slackware-live cd. Like Capt_Caveman said, Distrowatch has a bunch more.

http://www.slackware-live.org/scripts_howto.php

//moderator.note: not security related: distro related: mv to Linux - Distributions. Also I'll remind you you have still stuff to do.