What is vps-setup-hardening?

A manually invoked guide for setting up and securing a supported virtual private server, which is a remote machine rented from a hosting provider. It covers specific Ubuntu and Amazon Linux environments with required firewall and access checks.

Use it for an explicitly requested setup or hardening run on a supported Ubuntu server or Amazon Linux 2023 EC2 instance, after supplying the required server target.

It adds safety gates before connecting to or changing a server and limits the workflow to known operating-system and hosting profiles. It also prevents handling sensitive credentials through the process.

vps-setup-hardening — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by maxedapps

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add maxedapps/agent-skills --skill vps-setup-hardening

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/maxedapps/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/maxedapps/agent-skills/vps-setup-hardening.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/maxedapps/agent-skills/vps-setup-hardening)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/maxedapps/agent-skills/vps-setup-hardening"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/maxedapps/agent-skills/vps-setup-hardening.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Per session 116 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 990 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026

SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

medium Excessive Agency · line 37
Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.

Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.

How audits are shown

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00116	$0.00990
Opus 5	$0.00058	$0.00495
Sonnet 5	$0.00023	$0.00198
Haiku 4.5	$0.00012	$0.00099

Measured 8d ago against content hash dde488d287d3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vps-setup-hardening scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 16 executable files (scripts/al2023-ec2/apply-base-setup.sh, scripts/al2023-ec2/install-docker.sh, scripts/al2023-ec2/install-nodejs.sh, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/vps-setup-hardening/SKILL.md · 58 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 58 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Manual-only gate: If the user did not explicitly invoke vps-setup-hardening by name, stop without inspecting or changing any server. Explain that this skill is manual-only.

VPS Setup and Hardening

Supports exactly two closed profiles:

Profile	Host	Ingress
`ubuntu`	Ubuntu 24.04/26.04 (`amd64`/`arm64`)	No Docker: UFW. Docker: verified provider firewall.
`al2023-ec2`	Amazon Linux 2023 on positively identified EC2 (`x86_64`/`aarch64`)	EC2 Security Groups for every run.

Critical rules

Before connecting to or changing a server, read references/workflow.md completely and follow its gates in order.
After read-only inspection, load only the selected profile reference: references/ubuntu.md or references/al2023-ec2.md.
Treat invocation arguments and prior conversation as authoritative context. Do not ask the user to repeat a resolved choice or any discoverable fact. Ask only for required non-discoverable information, grouping unresolved choices into one compact question after inspection whenever possible.
Never request passwords, private keys, provider API tokens, Tailscale auth keys, or other credentials. Do not expose keys, tokens, authentication URLs, or sensitive configuration in reports.
Preserve the current working session through every SSH, Tailscale, firewall, Security Group, and reboot change. Never remove an access path until its replacement succeeds in a fresh independent test.
Stop at every human authentication, independent external test, provider/SG change, access-closing action, and reboot gate. Continue only from explicit evidence or confirmation for that gate.
Never claim provider or Security Group filtering from local server output. Distinguish local observations from user-confirmed provider state.
Never describe UFW or ordinary host-input filtering as protection for Docker-published ports. Docker always requires a verified provider/SG boundary first.
Never modify local ~/.ssh/config without separate explicit approval. Prefer command-line overrides for tests.
Use the bundled profile scripts rather than recreating their deterministic commands. Do not weaken or speculate past a script refusal. Unsupported hosts must fail before mutation.
Always finish a completed run with verification, cleanup of only the staged temporary bundle, and the report defined by assets/final-report.md.

Read the full file on GitHub · 58 lines

Files

What ships with it

26 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

8d ago First seen · 58 lines · 116 tokens per session scan A dde488d287d3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vps-setup-hardening is a skill published in the GitHub repository maxedapps/agent-skills (58 stars, last pushed 24d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 116 tokens to every session and 990 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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