It’s always a good idea to setup a local firewall on hosts that are on unprotected networks. The internet “winds” blow harder and harder each day, and it’s only a matter of time before some daemon has an exploit that gets taken advantage of. I use CentOS 5 for all my web servers, and here [...]
For one reason or another RHEL does not disallow incoming ssh connections as root. This is, of course a glaring security problem which should be addressed for all systems that allow ssh connections to be made from any but the most restricted networks.
The best practice, of course, would be to make the initial ssh connection [...]
Rather than leave MySQL open to the world, consider firewalling it off and tunneling a connection over ssh.
This command will allow you to connect to your MySQL server on hostname.domain.com on localhost:7777.
ssh -L7777:127.0.0.1:3306 user@hostname.domain.com
