Install and Configure

With Ubuntu installing is very straightforward,

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Apache 2.x is now installed.

Test

Verify that the Apache Web Server is running first by hitting your server's IP Address. If you do not know your ip address, at the console type,

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You should see a webpage show up saying "It works!".

Stopping, Starting, Restarting and Reload

You should know the basic commands to running Apache 2. Go ahead and try them. Note ignore the warning message about "fully qualified domain name" as that is covered in the next section.

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sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Provide Server Name

Apache is working fine, but during restart you will get the warning message, "apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using ...".

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sudo echo "ServerName $(bash -c "hostname")" >> /etc/apache2/httpd.conf"

Apache Basic Server Hardening

Here are some of the basic hardening steps I take today.

Edit /etc/apache2/conf.d/security

set ServerTokens Prod - This turns off all the extra header information sent by Apache. Primarily, it would let a client know what version of Apache is being used. The information could be used to look up vulnerabilities on the particular version of Apache you are running.

set ServerSignatures Off - Removes footer information from default apache pages. For example, page not found.

Optional Optimization

I found that you can save (according to htop about 3MB) of memory if the status apache module is disabled,

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That is for now. I might flush this section out a bit more later. Surprisingly, the default Apache configuration is very robust that I rarely need optimization. Instead, we focus optimization efforts on application servers which usually give us the biggest improvements.

References

http://cloudservers.mosso.com/index.php/Ubuntu_-_Apache_configuration#Security_Settings - Rackspace wiki on hardening Apache Web Server.