Quick & Easy Ubuntu Server

Setup a Ubuntu Server

(a Idiots guide to running a linux based web server)

this guide will make your server both secure and easy to administer

1. Droplet with LAMP Stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP)

Go to DigitalOcean
Create a account
Select Size
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Applications
LAMP on Ubuntu 14.04

2. Set mysql “root” Password and secure it

• mysqladmin -u root -p'password' password newpassword
• /usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation

3. Add a Web User

• adduser webuser
• usermod -a -G www-data webuser
• chgrp -R www-data /var/www
• chmod -R 770 /var/www
• ln -s /var/www /home/webuser/www

Now you can login with webuser using
a sftp client like Filezilla (use port 22)
and you have access to www files

4. Adminer (Optional)

Web based MySQL administration

• sudo apt-get install adminer
• sudo servie apache2 restart

You can now login with mysql root/password
http://yoursite.com/adminer

5. Monitoring (Optional)

vnstats lets you monitor daily/monthly bandwidth usage

• apt-get install vnstat

nethogs is a realtime monitor for ethernet traffic

• apt-get install nethogs

Glances is a system monitor for your GNU/Linux or BSD operating system from console

• sudo apt-get install python-pip build-essential python-dev
• sudo pip install Glances
• sudo pip install PySensors

6. Secure the system

• adduser your_username
• echo "your_username ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL" >> /etc/sudoers

Now you can run root commands by adding sudo before
the command you want to run like sudo apt-get install
use your user password

*disaster sudo recovery

• Go to Droplets > Access > Console Access
• logout
• login as root
• nano /etc/sudors <- modify it

7 Disable root login

• nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
• change PermitRootLogin yes to PermitRootLogin no
• sudo service ssh restart

now login as your_username and run sudo before every command
if you want to become root again run
sudo su

wiak // http://nwgat.net