Here we go…

I’m not sure what the format will be of this blog or how useful it will be to others, but it’s important to keep a record of what one does.

I find the user interface of wordpress to be a bit discombobulated. It took me forever to find how to post a new post in this blog. I’m pretty sure I can just use this link in the future:

https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/keepdocumenting.home.blog

In general, wordpress is probably great for people keeping blogs, but one of the things that I intend on doing is setting up something a little less bloated on my server. For now, that’ll do pig, that’ll do…

So, the other day, after a hard day at the construction job I work, I didn’t feel like going to BJJ practice, went home and setup a server instead. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for about 12 years. Better late than never, I guess. The plan is to setup servers in the not-too-distant future, on professional hardware in a rack at home, and have a little UPS to keep it up during electrical maintenance. But for now I’m just using my son’s old gaming PC and plopped it in the kitchen. I bought a new 1TB ssd for it, installed Ubuntu server 18 and initiated ssh. Boom, headless server. It didn’t take much time, really. Definately didn’t need to procrastinate 12 years for that… *sigh*

During the installation Ubuntu wanted, by default, to only use 4GB for the entire installation. Apparently its a Ubuntu bug that they haven’t seen a reason to fix for over a year (wtf Canonical?!). I didn’t even notice it myself. Thankfully I shared a picture of the installation with my friend, JD, who asked me why I wasn’t using the entire disk space. Repeating the installation took no time. I could have fucked around with the partitions using command line, post-installation, as people have pointed out on askubuntu but I want to stay focused on wanted to stay on task.

JD also helpfully pointed out that the boot partition was unnecessarily gigantic for what I’m intending to do, so from 1GB to 100MB it went. I tried to delete it completely, but Ubuntu really wanted it there and I didn’t feel like arguing with my son’s old PC. That would have worried my son.

After that I activated two factor authentication (following these instructions) for my ssh login because I heard it’s not that hard for people to brute force regular password logins. I was feeling totally cool and pro so I decided to brag to my professional developer / programmer friend again, to which he replied “why don’t you just use ssh keys?”…

So now I’ll be deactivating 2fa and activating ssh keys for my remote ssh logins, because, honestly the 2fa is a bit of a pain in the ass. Like, what if I can’t find my phone or be bothered to get out of bed, walk across the room and retrieve my phone out of my pants pocket? First world problems…

https://www.linode.com/docs/security/authentication/use-public-key-authentication-with-ssh/

Another thing I did was forward the ssh port on my home router so when it receives an ssh request from the internet, it directs to my kitchen-gaming-PC-server. I should probably change the port from the default 22 to something more obscure, for security purposes. Like all security precautions, it’s better to procrastinate and do it later.

Oh yeah, one more thing… I updated and upgraded my entire system.

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

For other N00bs out there, this is important before you start working on your linux system for the first time. I once unknowingly installed an ancient version of pagekite, because I hadn’t updated my system. It took me forever to realize why it was acting so buggy. Save yourselves time and update/upgrade your system, kids.

So, yea… I’ll keep you all updated on my server progress with a post later today