Current best practice for securing a droplet?

Posted July 19, 2018
PostgreSQL Security Ubuntu 18.04

I see a lot of the most recent tutorials only detail securing a droplet with UFW or the DO droplet firewall. I recall a number of years ago there were many tutorials advocating Fail2Ban etc. are these still recommended?

I currently use SSH with public key login only, no passwords and wish to use my droplet to host a Postgres database for remote usage whilst developing a django app which I’ll eventually host on DO.

ianniko86

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doghouch • July 20, 2018

There is no “one size fits all” solution for security, but generally, utilities such as fail2ban are good to have installed :)

You’ve already done a decent job of securing your server, but some things you should do are:

keep everything updated (just make sure that you don’t update on something critical before checking for compatibility on another server/droplet)
enable the firewall and only allow the IP address(es) for the servers that will access the database
block nonessential ports
change the SSH port to something other than 22

(there are definitely more things you can do, but this is just a small list of things I have off the top of my mind right now)

I hope this helps!

Aaron

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