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)

Configuring administration tasks with sudo


Ubuntu implements a number of practices out of the box to make the default installation more secure. One of these practices is the disabling of the root account and the use of sudo for superuser privileges. The sudo program provides a much more robust set of features to increase user privileges as compared to the traditional su program.

The sudo command's configuration file can be found at /etc/sudoers. By default, Ubuntu provides a basic file that allows root users to do anything as any other user, and allows members of the admin group to become root users (the user that you create at the time of installation is automatically added to this group).

The sudo package provides a tool called visudo that you should use whenever you want to make changes to the file. Therefore, to view and edit the /etc/sudoers file, type in the following command:

sudo visudo

The reason you want to use visudo is that it automatically checks your sudoers file for mistakes...