Book Image

Ubuntu Server Essentials

By : Abdelmonam Kouka
Book Image

Ubuntu Server Essentials

By: Abdelmonam Kouka

Overview of this book

Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux operating system built on top of the Debian architecture. It is used to make operating systems for multiple platforms, including phones, desktops, TVs and mobiles. It has made some serious progress in the realms of efficiency and user friendliness. With evolving technology trends, demands on software have changed, with more and more skilled users. Over the past few years, services such as Facebook, Twitter, and push notifications on smartphones mean that users are used to being up to date with everything that happens all the time. With SignalR, the applications stay connected and will generate notifications when something happens either from the system or by other users. This provides new opportunities for the system administrators, to enter this new and exciting world of real-time application development. This is a concise and a cost-friendly guide, packed with up-to-date essentials on Ubuntu Server fundamentals. It will guide you through deploying and configuring Ubuntu servers in your office environments. You’ll start by installing Ubuntu Server, then move to the most useful aspect —the command-line interface inside it. You’ll extend your knowledge by learning how to administrate and configure Ubuntu Server. You will also see how to deploy services on Ubuntu Server and find out how to secure it. You’ll get to grips with the virtualization and cloud computing facilities provided by Ubuntu, and finally, you’ll gain some very useful tips.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Setting up a DNS server


A DNS is a domain name system server that answers queries about domain names by providing the relative IP address. It is a must for www working; without it, users will have to learn the IP addresses of every website that they want to visit and type them manually in their browser (or add them manually to host files), which is impossible.

There are a lot of programs that provide DNS services under Ubuntu, but the most common one is BIND.

The BIND installation

If you missed installing BIND during the Ubuntu Server installation, you can do it now, and there is more than one way of doing that.

You can either use the tasksel utility, which will automatically install for you the two bind9 and bind9-doc packages. Alternatively, you can use the apt-get tool, as follows:

sudo apt-get install bind9 bind9-doc

Once the BIND packages are installed, it is fully configured and functional with the default parameters that allow it to work as a caching DNS for recursive queries. You can...