A personal script, focuses more on getting a server ready for my preferences than it does on security: http://pastie.org/pastes/6376503/text

Here's something I wrote very quickly (bash script): https://github.com/vahek/vSetup It does most of the stuff mentioned in the post, however doesn't setup automatic updates or Logwatch.

(to both corin and vahe): That kind of shell scripting is the horrorshow that motivated configuration management tools* in the first place. Shell scripts require a lot of added complexity to manage multiple heterogeneous servers, or to be idempotent.

* Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Salt, CFEngine, etc.

I agree. However, there is no learning curve to get started using this script and was put together in a few minutes.