A separate user for each task?

Posted by Mark Tomlin on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Mark Tomlin
Published on 2012-06-03T00:22:00Z Indexed on 2012/06/03 4:43 UTC
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I just got a VPS sver the other day, I'm new to server administration, but not that new to Ubuntu (11.04). I use it in my living room as the HTPC, and I had a previous VPS that I used on and off for a team speak server. This one I'm setting up for long term use. So I would like to know the best practice when it comes to websites and tasks that I have the server proforming. I understand that it could be beneficial to separate each website into it's own usergroup or under its own username. I would setup nginx so that it could read all of the users directors (and thus each website) but could not touch anything else. The same with the TeamSpeak, should I make a user for TeamSpeak so that it operates within its own confined area or is this overkill?

I do have access to root on the sever and my current plan is to run about 4 websites and a TeamSpeak server. My stack is Linux (Ubuntu 11.04 LTS), nginx, and PHP 5.4.3 (using the PDO SQLite 3 built in driver for the database). Should PHP have it's own user group or is it ok to place it in with nginx?

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