Ever been annoyed by a Mambo site that loads unreasonably slowly on the first hit, then subsequent page loads are an order of magnitude faster? Unfortunately I have too, and on more than one occasion. When this cropped up for me yet again, I was reminded of the apparent lack of good information on this subject. With that in mind, I decided to sit down and write the following article on how to solve it. If you're with me so far, read on.

In the prior edition of this article, we covered several general practices to avoid when deploying a new Linux system. The focus there was primarily in hardening the system from an outside perspective. While hardening against external attack is certainly crucial, one should never stop there. For this reason, I intend to go over some noteworthy things to avoid which can adversely effect the internal security of a Linux host.