Software I use & recommend
Here list of my 'software alternatives' decisions which makes my Gentoo installations more secure and reliable:
- hardened-sources
- I use Gentoo Hardened, this include patched kernel sources and toolchain.
- runit
- Runit is improved version of DJB's daemontools. It make system boot/shutdown, restarting services and log rotation really reliable.
- socklog
- Socklog replaces usual syslog and klog by simple and reliable alternative.
- djbdns
- Djbdns is reliable and secure alternative for bind.
- qmail
- Qmail is reliable and secure alternative for sendmail (actually I'm using netqmail). Probably postfix is also acceptable alternative, but I've no experience with it.
- qmail-pop3sd
- qmail-pop3d used with sslserver (from ucspi-ssl) turn into secure POP3 service (Maildir only).
- 3proxy
- 3proxy is good alternative for bloated squid.
- twoftpd
- twoftpd is simple, secure and efficient FTP server. Sadly, I've some issues with it, but can't find better alternative yet.
- dcron
- Dcron is lightweight and minimalistic cron daemon.
- fastcgi
- FastCGI (in external server mode) is much more portable, secure and manageable way to efficiently run CGI/PHP scripts - unlike SuExec, mod_perl and mod_php.
- asciidoc
- AsciiDoc simple yet powerful documentation system.
Also: Vim, Mutt, Pidgin, Opera, Clementine, FluxBox, Conky, rTorrent.