phpMyAdmin is a popular software  and as such is a target for various scripted attacks. If you run phpMyAdmin installation somewhere you should really make sure it is secured.

There are some things you can do to keep you safer:

1. Remove setup directory from phpMyAdmin. You will not use it after initial setup:

 rm -rf /usr/share/phpmyadmin/setup/

2. Prevent access to libraries directory from browser.  You can use a .htaccess file for this.

3. In case you don’t want all  users  to access phpMyAdmin  you can use AllowDeny rules to limit them:

Use the following in the file config,inc.php of phpMyAdmin to restrict access to from remote machines.

vim /usr/share/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php

The following tutorial is done with Debian Squeeze version 6.0.2.
In this tutorial, I will show you the shortest and easiest way to set up nginx  with PHP5, MySQL and phpmyadmin running through FastCGI:

Step 1: Installation:

apt-get install nginx mysql-server mysql-client php5 php5-cgi php5-mysql phpmyadmin

NOTE: After you have installed all above you will need to edit the php.ini file:
Open php.ini file end remove the ; in front of the line cgi.fix_pathinfo=1

Step 2: Make PHP FastCGI daemon listening on port 9000 on localhost and start at boot.

Edit the /etc/rc.local file and put the following content:

vim /etc/rc.local
/usr/bin/spawn-fcgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 9000 -u www-data -g www-data -f /usr/bin/php5-cgi -P /var/run/fastcgi-php.pid

Step 3: Create virtual host file for your site:

If you discovered that proxying your webserver with varnish breaks PhpMyAdmin I’ve got the solution:

Problem is that the backend webserver, apache2 or nginx doesn’t even know it’s running behind another software.

Varnish does a completely normal request to webserver. Most times this isn’t any problem at all.

PhpMyAdmin tries to be “smart” and figure out its absolute URL and I run the apache2 or nginx backend on port 80.

The solution is to force an URL.

Add the following line to “config.inc.php“, changing the obvious:

$cfg['PmaAbsoluteUri'] = 'http://yourdomain.com/phpmyadmin/';

Enjoy!

PhpMyAdmin by default allows you to import only 2 MB file. In many cases this is just way too little.

In order to increase the values you need to alter your php.ini settings. For example put these in your php.ini to import 50 MB files:

post_max_size = 50M
upload_max_filesize = 50M

You can also create a .htaccess file with the above contents in the phpMyAdmin directory:

php_value post_max_size 50M
php_value upload_max_filesize 50M

This guide will cover installing and updating Apache 2, MySQL 5 and PHP 5 on Debian Linux.

Step 1. To start with, its important to make sure apt-get is the latest version.

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

* This line will update your aptitude to the latest version information and then upgrade the applications on your computer.

Step 2. Next, lets install Apache2.

apt-get install apache2

* This will install and provide basic configuration for apache2.
*  The default web directory will is /var/www and the Apache 2 configuration can be found in /etc/apache2/.