My xenforo sites are currently hosted by URLJet shared hosting which is awesome but I want to learn more about server administration. I even gave them a positive Review last night. Unfortunately I cannot use Digital Point's User Map since GeoIP won't work with shared hosting. I also want to use Google Page Speed Service for my main xenForo site and Cloudflare for my new xenForo site so that I compare these two CDN's performance and speed against each other on site's like www.webpagetest.org and unshit I made a thread on xenForo about my situation and the best deal I saw was for Fanatical VPS who has a 2 year anniversary deal going on. I did research on this host like I did on the others and out of the other hosts, their reviews were the best such as this one. Combined with their discount and the medium plan, I now have a unmanaged VPS that is 4 times larger than my current shared host account and two times cheaper at $14 bucks a month compared to $34.95 a month. At first I was amazed at such a good deal but then I realized I didn't know wtf I was doing. CentOS 5 was installed by default. My first project was to learn how to secure my server so I found this guide and managed to lock myself out. I started thinking, 'man I really need to get used to this stuff' and remembered that I have Ubuntu 10.04 installed as a partition on my computer that I normally use for Windows 7. I thought it would be a good idea to match the server OS with the one I have so I decided to upgrade Ubuntu on my computer (which I'll do later) and replace CentOS 5 on my server with Ubuntu 11.04 since that is the latest stable one FanaticalVPS has available. I reinstalled the OS and reset my password via the FanaticalVPS SolusVM Access Panel and am now studying these guides to get started. Ubuntu 11-04 http://releases.ubuntu.com/natty/ Setting Up Ubuntu 11-04 Lamp http://www.ubuntugeek.com/step-by-step-ubuntu-11-04-natty-lamp-server-setup.html The Perfect Server - Ubuntu 11-04 http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-ubuntu-11.04-ispconfig-3 CentOS vs Ubuntu: http://serverfault.com/questions/53954/centos-vs-ubuntu
Thanks! All day I've been trying to create a new user. Apparently there's an update that breaks permissions in Ubuntu 10.04. (I had tried the older version first) so I'm going to try again with 11.04.
This is where Winderz users make a huge mistake when they go to Linux. Updates are not necessary unless it's a security update. Running the latest and greatest isn't necessary, nor is it even advisable in many cases. CentOS 5 is rock solid and EOL isn't until 2017. Newer servers may have CentOS 6 installed and the EOL is 2020 for that version. And while there are some complaints about the repositories not being updated that often, let's get real here, shall we? The only thing you should be running on the server is core stuff. Updates for browsers, xserver, desktop management, etc. shouldn't even be entering into the picture. It's a bloody server for Christ sake. This is the beauty of CentOS. Any update that makes it to the repo is generally going to work. And while it's admirable that you're trying to learn, you really should familiarize yourself on your desktop before attempting to bring a live server on line.
The host provides server editions of Linux minus all the extra stuff you mentioned. I am reinstalling CentOS 5 though because I had issues creating a ssh user and locking out the root.
You don't create a ssh user. You create a user that has access to ssh. This is why you practice on your desktop first.
I know, said it wrong. This is what I've been doing: sudo adduser myusername sudo addgroup sshlogin sudo adduser myusername sshlogin AllowGroups sshlogin in the nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config folder Restart putty and login as sudo myusername.
No. You ssh in using the new username and THEN su to root. ssh username@servername.com usernamepassword su root rootpassword Edit - I don't use putty, but you would log in using just the username to the server. Once logged in, then you would: su root rootpassword
I'm using 10.04 now and this guide: http://nanotux.com/blog/the-ultimate-server/ Best guide so far but none of my config edits are saving.
