Vps Toolkit

VPS TOOLKIT

Ubuntu Server LTS 2014 Edidion

VPS TOOLKIT

Ubuntu Server LTS 2014 Edidion

Edited by Davide Gatti

Copyright © 2014 by Davide Gatti

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher and/or the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2014

ISBN 978-1-326-07963-5

DeeWHY

London, United Kingdom

www.deewhy.org

Ordering:

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e-mail: [email protected]

Dedication

Ciao amico mio.

Sempre sul cuore.

Forewords

This guide is intended for webmasters who wish to overcome the limitations of traditional hosting space. The use of a Virtual Private Server allows to increase productivity in terms of time, total control of the filesystem and often let lower management costs. The VPS also allows to use all those applications which require server-side rooting control.

Particular attention will be dealt with the part relating to security, developing the critical settings at the same time in every steps of the server configuration.

All the arguments will be treated with examples and commands using Linux Ubuntu Server 14.04.1 LTS, but from the logical point of view the concepts may be completely withheld in any recent Linux Server OS in a simple and fast way.

Introduction

What’s a VPS ?

A Virtual Private Server is Virtual Machine that permit to get over the classic commercial hosting space because it allows full control of on the server side - it’s often used for development and testing purposing too.

When a pure VPS is ready to be accessed online after the purchase from the service-provider or after a freshly re-installation, it comes with some features and basically IP address to be reached to connect it on, so as a minimum we should have:

-         Root access credentials;

-         IPv4 address and sometime IPv6 address / VPS Host Name;

plus some kind of Online Keyboard Replication to simulate the fact the user is virtually directly present onto the remote machine; that could be done throw a KVM server for keyboard remote simulation or a Remote Control Server i.e. RealVNC, TeamViewer or other in case of a GUI interface is installed (not so often on a VPS).

:: 1 :: Preliminary Steps

Remote connection to the new VPS

So let’s connect to the VPS with an SSH Client. In a Windows OS environment in most cases is necessary to download the SSH Client form the external i.e. PuTTY, using LINUX – MacOSX just run the Terminal and run the command ‘ssh’ with the appropriate options. The standard port to connect throw is the number 22, we can use the VPS IP address for now but if there’s a DNS Server somewhere that can resolve the VPS Host Name (and there’s it in almost all cases) or if we’ve already imposed the right redirection for a domain name, it’s possible to use that as well.

from the Terminal:

ssh 192.168.1.11 or ssh 192.168.1.11 –l root (to directly put the UserID / fit the same using PuTTY for Windows)

:: pay attention to the fact, when prompting the password nothing will be showed for security reasons ::

Starting the VPS configuration - Preliminary steps

The first thing to do when accessing a new VPS is check the network configuration, to do it type:

ifconfig

and annotate in particular what network adapters are configured and associated to the public IP addresses. Then make the OS up to date:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

confirming ‘Yes’ :: literally, case sensitive :: when asked to proceed.

On a new server, there are a few configuration steps that you should take early on as part of the basic setup. This will increase the security, usability and will gives a solid foundation for subsequent actions.

Root Login: clarifications

To log into the server initially, you will need to know your server's public IP address and the password for