Secure /tmp and /var/tmp OpenVZ

Many administrators increase their server’s security by running securetmp on their vps’s. It is especially important to do this on shared servers such as cPanel. This is a quick guide on how to secure your /tmp directory on the OpenVZ VPS system, this is different to a normal server.

First open fstab using nano, or your chosen editor:

nano -w /etc/fstab

Next append the following like to the fstab file you just opened:

none /tmp tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec 0 0

If you opened using nano you can now close using ctrl+x and then answering “y” to save.

To apply the changes we now need to simply remount:

mount -o remount /tmp

Its always a good idea to test it worked so run the following command:

df -h

Within the output you should see something like:

none 4.1G 0 4.1MG 3% /tmp

There is also a /var/tmp dir that needs to be secured.

So firstly make a backup (don’t skip this step, you need the files in a bit)

mv /var/tmp /var/tmpfiles

We can now make a link to map /tmp to /var/tmp

ln -s /tmp /var/tmp

Restore the files from the backup you made before

cp /var/tmpfiles/* /tmp/

Restore the files from the backup you made before, and make sure that the files in tmpfiles are now in tmp.

ls /var/tmpfiles

ls /var/tmp

If it looks ok, you can remove the tmpfiles directory.

Rm -rf /var/tmpfiles

thanks zany

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