There is a vast amount of other software that you need to run a server. This page lists some of the other packages I installed.
It is always useful if the server can send me mail if something goes wrong. For example if I set up a cron job to clean up something or run an update and something goes wrong then cron will send me mail. By default this mail will sit on the server until I next remember to type mail at a command prompt. Or I could set up mail forwarding to send that mail to my gmail account where I might read it so I needed a Mail Transport Agent. A MTA is not the program you read and write email with it is the program that your mail client talks to send mail out. In the old days this used to mean sendmail which was very scary (The O’Reily Sendmail book is about 400 pages thick). Fortunately things have improved since the last time I set a server up and Fedora uses a modern MTA called postfix and as I had a very simple set up in mind it was pretty easy to set up. I followed the instructions at http://postfix.state-of-mind.de/patrick.koetter/smtpauth/postfix_configuration.html as all I needed was to be able to forward local mail to the university SMTP server. The trick was to make sure no one else could send mail out in my name.
Sometime later I was browsing the httpd log files and I could see that there were lots of requests for odd pages that I didn’t have (like phpadmin and w00tw00t.at.blackhats.romanian.anti-sec) - well that didn’t look like a good thing. Since I didn’t have any of those pages on my machine I was OK but it seems likely that this is slowing the machine down as some of these script-kiddies seemed to be asking for hundreds of pages. I decided that something needed to be done, I found fail2ban which seemed to automate banning these guys’ machines for me. Following the instructions at http://www.fail2ban.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page and http://www.howtoforge.com/preventing-brute-force-attacks-with-fail2ban-on-fedora9 was very easy and since I already had mail set up (see above) I now get emails so I can gloat when script kiddies are consigned to the firewall blocking.