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)

The basic security settings


First of all, let's have a look at how to set up a basic security level for Ubuntu Server. There is a saying in security circles that security is a process, not a product. What this means is that despite what your vendor might tell you, you can't solve all your security problems with some application or software. Instead, you will find real security when you start to follow good security principles and develop good security procedures. This is what we will mainly see in this section.

Managing users

In this subsection, you will discover best practices in terms of user management, which covers not only user creation, modification, and deletion, but also group attribution, permissions, and a lot of other details.

User account administration

The following are the most useful commands that are required to set up and manage user accounts:

  • useradd: This command adds the user that was passed in as a parameter to the local authentication system

  • usermod: This command modifies...