This short guide is basically just a reminder to myself, where most of the content is based on Digital Ocean’s Initial Server Setup with Ubuntu 16.04 and my own memory.

Disclaimer: This short guide is basically just a reminder to myself, where most of the content is based on Digital Ocean’s Initial Server Setup with Ubuntu 16.04 and my own memory. There are some important steps that aren’t included in this guide. If you’re new to Linux or Ubuntu, I suggest that you read Digital Ocean’s guide instead.

All commands in this guide (unless otherwise stated) assume you are currently logged in as root.

We don’t want to use the root user when logging in to our server, so we need to create a new user.

If you’re only using keys to log in to your server (which you should), you can choose to not create a password for the new user using the --disabled-password option. Please note that you’ll be unable to use sudo with this user unless you also perform the steps in this post.

Our newly created user will typically need root privileges:

Now, if you want this user to be able to use sudo without the need for a password, here’s how to accomplish this.

At this point we’re ready to copy the public keys to the newly created user’s .ssh folder. I won’t cover all the details of this process in this guide. Please refer to the previously mentioned Digital Ocean guide if you’re uncertain of how to do this.

We will need to set the correct permissions:

Note: These commands assume you are logged in as your newly created user.

chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Also make sure that these files are owned by the user we just created.

On new Digital Ocean droplets, this step is usually already done when creating the droplet. Just to make sure, we’ll check to see if the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config contains the following lines and that none of them are commented out:

PasswordAuthentication no
PubkeyAuthentication yes
ChallengeResponseAuthentication no

If you did any changes, reload the SSH daemon:

Note: Try connecting to your server in a separate tab/window before disconnecting.

We need to make sure that our server doesn’t expose unnecessary ports and protocols, so lets configure UFW in the most basic way possible:

Note: At this point you should once more verify that you’re able to log in to your server.

This concludes this short guide on how to perform the initial steps when creating a new Ubuntu (16.04) server.

Basic server setup (Ubuntu)

This is something I don’t do that often, and I always forget the correct syntax. Thus this post.

Let’s say you have a table images and a table users. Now you want to delete all rows in table images that are associated with rows in the table users that are marked as deleted.

First, I usually do a visual inspection of the rows that will be deleted:

SELECT i.* FROM images i LEFT JOIN users u ON i.user_id = u.id WHERE u.deleted = 1;

The rows returned by this query are the rows that will be deleted when you run the following query:

DELETE i FROM images i LEFT JOIN users u ON i.user_id = u.id WHERE u.deleted = 1;

They key part here is to specify which table you want to delete from. In this case it’s the table i, which is the images table.

Deleting rows with a LEFT JOIN in MySQL

Disabling the password needed for sudo for a specific user is very easy in Ubuntu. This method applies to Ubuntu 16.04, but probably also other versions of Ubuntu and maybe even other distros.

Note: If this is the first time you’re running this command, you’ll most likely be presented with a list of editors to choose from. Choose the one you’re most comfortable with.

Then enter the following line at the end of the file:

Make sure to replace user with the username of the user you want to allow using sudo without entering a password.

Disabling password for sudo in Ubuntu

The Royal Norwegian Air Force practices formation flying every year in December. This year, they were schedule to fly over Bodø at 11:22 on December 8th. I managed to capture them with my zoom lens just a couple minutes after their scheduled arrival.

It wasn't the greatest light for photographing moving aircrafts, but I managed to get a couple of photos that turned out somewhat okay.

RNoAF Christmas Star 2022

I relatively recently posted about moving my website to WordPress. This actually still holds true, but I’ve given the website a new look and made some changes to the deployment routines.

Now I have a solid development focused foundation based on Trellis.

My website is my playground. This is where I can freely play with any new technologies that I come across and just have some fun. It’s important to me that some of the things I do on the computer is just for fun, and not only work related – there’s quite a lot of that.

My previous WordPress setup was just a Digital Ocean droplet created using their One-Click WordPress installation. This works fine if you just want a website up and running where you can add a theme and your favorite plugins and start typing. But it gets a bit trickier when you want to have a local development version of the site on your computer and a production version, and even maybe a staging version, running live on the internet.

This is where Trellis comes into play. It’s a ready-to-use setup based on Bedrock and Ansible and lots of other good stuff that makes it really simple to get up and running with three different environments:

The workflow for setting up a new site once you have Trellis installed is something along the lines of:

Do some small adjustments to a couple of configuration files for the hosts (servers) and the various environments

Create a git repository of your project and push it to ie. Github

And voilà! Your site is now deployed to the staging server. Of course, you must have set up a server somewhere to use as a staging server. The same goes for the production environment.

In addition to this, I use the WP DB Migrate Pro plugin(s) so that I can easily migrate my database and media files from one environment to another.

Website changes – again

I'm Kim, a full-stack web developer and entrepreneur based in Bodø, Norway. Currently occupied with running my own company, being a father and raising a little standard poodle.

Full-stack web developer, business owner and tech geek.

Basic server setup (Ubuntu)

Add a user

Root privileges

Public Key Authentication

Disable password authentication

Firewall