Server Virtualization

I neglected to write about something that happened this summer. Someone hacked my server through a vulnerability in Wordpress. I was hosting a site for a friend and I let it be. I never monitored the site or did security updates on it at all. I don't know why I didn't think to be responsible about what I hosted. The version of Wordpress that was running was almost two years old and it did indeed get hacked through a vulnerability in the upload function. My server was completely trashed. Somehow the hacker got enough access to delete most of the files on the drive. Luckily, I was able to recover everything that was important to me.

That brings us to my strategy at present. I put a new hard disk drive in my server and installed a minimal Gentoo installation. Then I installed VMware Server on it and built a Windows Server virtual machine. It's been running great for about six months now. If anyone ever manages to do something bad to my server again I just have to roll back to my latest snapshot of the server and I am good to go. There's no dealing with installing the operating system and reconfiguring PHP/Apache and all the other server goodies.

I highly recommend server virtualization to even the casual home server administrator. If you aren't doing it, you should! Go get [url=http://www.vmware.com/products/server/]VMware's free server[/url] now!