How To Use a Linux Virtual Private Server 303
Nerval's Lobster writes "Game developer David Bolton writes: 'For my development of Web games, I've hit a point where I need a Virtual Private Server. (For more on this see My Search for Game Hosting Begins.) I initially chose a Windows VPS because I know Windows best. A VPS is just an Internet-connected computer. "Virtual" means it may not be an actual physical computer, but a virtualized host, one of many, each running as if it were a real computer. Recently, though, I've run into a dead end, as it turns out that Couchbase doesn't support PHP on Windows. So I switched to a Linux VPS running Ubuntu server LTS 12-04. Since my main desktop PC runs Windows 7, the options to access the VPS are initially quite limited, and there's no remote desktop with a Linux server. My VPS is specified as 2 GB of ram, 2 CPUs and 80 GB of disk storage. The main problem with a VPS is that you have to self-manage it. It's maybe 90% set up for you, but you need the remaining 10%. You may have to install some software, edit a config file or two and occasionally bounce (stop then restart) daemons (Linux services), after editing their config files.'"
And your problem is .... ? (Score:5, Informative)
.... you are new to Linux, and you need some help?
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Beginners/FAQ [ubuntu.com]
gus
Re:n00b (Score:5, Informative)
Have you looked at Ubuntu Server Edition lately? They have an LTS version that's supported for 5 years of security updates without updating to a new distro release. Debian doesn't come close.
Re:Ahem (Score:5, Informative)
Default install of Ubuntu-server is headless. You can type sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop and you will have a GUI.
Remote Desktop for Linux (Score:3, Informative)
Use NX Client for Windows - http://www.nomachine.com/download-package.php?Prod_Id=3835 [nomachine.com]
Re:Apt-get install clue (Score:4, Informative)
Mod this up further. And learn to use screen.
Linux does have a RDP server (Score:5, Informative)
www.xrdp.org
Works very well.
Re:I'm actualy considering leaving Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
What has happened? It used to be so nice place to be.
I admire your long term memory. You remember 15 years ago like it was yesterday.
Re:Apt-get install clue (Score:5, Informative)
Oh and a couple of things I really should have mentioned.... save yourself some trouble, and make sure you have dos2unix.
Because I know you wont learn vi overnight (or do what i did and avoid it for several years), and you will likely find some shell extention that does sshfs or realize that you can use winscp to sftp into the box and then right click on a file and edit, or you will just copy a file locally and edit it, and reupload.
At some point, you WILL transfer a file that has the wrong line endings, and it will be one of the ones where it matters (there are many times it is not a problem, shell scripts are not one of them). The file command will often tip you off to dos line endings, and dos2unix will do the conversion.
If you want to move a file or several files from one unix machine to another, but have to copy to a windows machine inbetween.... make a tarball and move that instead.
Oh and always set putty and winscp to use blowfish as the first cipher....it speeds up file transfer times significantly over the AES default.
And always make backup copies of config files before you edit them. Consider installing git and using git for this purpose right in /etc
If nothing else, being able to do a "git diff" and see everything you have changed since the last commit will be inordinately helpful when making posts asking for help in online forums.
Fuck this. (Score:3, Informative)
Dear slashdot editors, please forward this onto corp if it was upmodded enough to notice.
Because of this article pushed through geek.net, I am blocking all of your ads for one month.
That article is total drivel and crap. I don't care if you thought it was good. I don't care what demographic some idiot thought they were getting out to.
It's so dumbed down and idiotic as to be offensive. It isn't a legitimate slashdot. It isn't a legitimate ask slashdot as evidenced by the offsite link. It isn't even really a question. It's a shitty attempt to get us to click through to a crappy article with a crappy question written by someone who evidently can't even use google or IRC correctly.
Fuck your slashvertisements.
Some ideas (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.openssh.org/ - this goes on your server
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html - this goes on your windows 7 desktop
This is how linux works
https://code.google.com/edu/tools101/linux/basics.html
most configs are text files you edit
http://www.lagmonster.org/docs/vi.html
thats vi.
or nano learn to use this too
http://www.nano-editor.org/
updates are done with apt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Packaging_Tool
http://packages.ubuntu.com/ - packages you can find by looking through ubuntu's web catalouge. Yes there is a search function.
Thats the polite way of saying RTFM. In a previous life, I'd call you an idiot.
In this life, it sounds like your in need of a full time sys admin, and I'm your man.
Re:n00b (Score:4, Informative)
>Debian Stable is the epitome of long term support
Actually, it's absolutely not. Long Term Support means that when I deploy a set of services on a system, I know exactly how long I have before I need to qualify, test, and roll out that application when the current version reaches EOL. Many of the clients I've worked with take a year or more to do such a qualification (because of complex applications, lacking test suites, lacking development resources, etc...).
Note on the Debian Wikipedia page that the only supported version (6.0/squeeze) lists "supported until" as "TBA".
Every other LTS release out there (Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS, SLES), lists multiple supported releases, with end of life dates in the future. For example, Ubuntu lists 5 currently supported releases, the most recent of which is supported until April 2017. CentOS lists 2, the most recent of which is supported until the end of 2020.
I love Debian, but I do not recommend my clients use it for servers. Right now, if a client deployed their services on the most recent Debian server, they have no idea when the End of Life is going to be. The current release will go End of Life a year after the next version is released. The next version has been in freeze since June 30, 2012, so this could be any time now. If testing for migration to a new OS takes a year (which is not uncommon in my experience), you could deploy a service and immediately need to start working on migrating it.
RHEL, on the other hand, you can deploy it today and know that you don't HAVE to migrate until 2020.
As a production sys admin I assert that it's not reasonable to run a server in production that is not receiving security updates.
So, as far as Debian as an LTS release: Just don't.