Having Fun With Remote Shells

I just bought a VPS (virtual private server) a couple of days ago, and I’m enjoying tinkering with it. It’s not the most powerful beast, though; it only has 64 MB of RAM and 128 MB of swap. I won’t say the name of the company I’m subscribed to since my box isn’t exactly a bastion of security, but you should be able to discern the shell provider from how I describe my escapades. :D

The most important lesson I’ve learned while playing sysadmin is: learn how to take notes. I had to take things down, reload, reboot, reconfigure, and do it over and over again during the last couple of days. In the end, I settled for a no-frills Ubuntu Breezy and decided to scrap the Webmin idea and learn how to hand-configure the daemons myself. But everything would have been much easier from the start had I taken notes. Now I have them, and should I need to reinstall the thing (I hope I don’t), I have a copy of them. :)

I’ll post it here too, just in case I lose that piece of paper (which I expect will happen).

• Disable root SSH login: nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
• Create a normal user account: useradd -m -s /bin/bash -g users username
• Create a password for normal user account: passwd username
• Add username to list of sudoers: visudo
• Test account and sudo access, then remove root login: sudo passwd root -l
• Relog as normal user and restart the SSH daemon: /etc/init.d/ssh restart
• Add /bin/false to /etc/shells
• Update apt-get package list: sudo apt-get update
• Upgrade the whole system to the latest programs: sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

That should take care of the initial setup.

Now, what am I using the remote shell for? Since I still haven’t figured out how to configure a web server, I’m currently running my bot on it. ^_^ Here are the steps I took:

• Install an FTP daemon: sudo apt-get install vsftpd
• Configure the FTP daemon to accept uploads: sudo nano /etc/vsftpd.conf
  • anonymous_enable=NO
  • local_enable=YES
  • write_enable=YES
• Restart the FTP daemon: sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart
• Install GNU Screen: sudo apt-get install screen
• Install compilers and development headers: sudo apt-get install build-essential
• Install subversion: sudo apt-get install subversion
• Install development headers for readline: sudo apt-get install libreadline5-dev
• FTP configuration files from the local computer
• Placeholder for the webserver stuff (Yay! It works~)

http://rimuhosting.com/howto/virtualhosting.jsp

libapache2-mod-php5

php5-mysql

phpyadmin

So far, that’s all I’ve done. I’ll update this page when I do more with my box.