[Sussex] An introduction and Apache

[Will Earnshaw]

Hey everyone!

     I'm Will. I run an Ubuntu Server 10.04 box remotely and I am still 
getting to grips with everything. It's currently in a room in my house 
but eventually I hope to out source to a cloud computing server. As such 
everything I do involves wrestling with the command line, (not always a 
fun thing to do!). It would be great to get to know people in the local 
area who are also involved with this sort of thing!
I hear that recently you had a talk on the command line. Trust me to 
join just too late! I could have really used that meeting.
I'm still learning but eventually I want to be involved in computer 
programming, and will happily contribute (as I may) to any open projects 
you are running or are involved with.  I can also write webpages using 
PHP but haven't really sat down to do any major project with it yet.
I'm currently working on a java game that will run in a webpage, its a 
card battling and trading game a little like magic the gathering but 
that's another story!

I've recently installed Apache web server and managed to get it to run 
several websites that I own. However, I've noticed that when you type a 
directory into the url bar (i.e. www.example.co.uk/main/) it shows an 
FTP like read out of the files within that directory, including the 
behind the scenes php scripts. Is it possible to stop it doing this?
The other thing I don't like it doing is it reports that its apache, and 
tells the user the version of Ubuntu it's sitting on. I don't suppose 
there's any real harm in that, but I'm not really comfortable about 
giving away so much information.

I'm sure at some point my server will be attacked, and its only then 
will I learn how to keep it secure. But I'm very paranoid about the 
little things I notice myself.

Regards

Will

P.S. I've never used a mailing list before, so hopefully this all works!