My birthday present: a server renting, Kimsufi (provided by OVH) with “Ubuntu Server Edition” installed (10.04 LTS). The step-by-step configuration is described in these posts, the first one being the first connexion and the basic configuration.

A raw distribution with SSH access is delivered. Two emails are sent by OVH:

• the first one, when creating the user account, gives access to the manager interface on OVH website;
• the second one, when the server is ready, gives the server IP and the root’s password.

First connexion

Open a terminal and type:

ssh root@IP

where IP is the server IP address (or its name); enter the password.

The original password can be modified by passwd: changing the password and keeping it in a safe location is highly recommended.

Packages update

The packages are updated by:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Network Time Protocol install

The Network Time Protocol (or NTP) is a protocol for synchronizing the clock of your server over time servers. NTP is simply installed by

apt-get install ntpq

and can be configured by editing the file /etc/net.conf where time servers can be added. My Kimsufi server is located near Paris so I added the following time servers:

server ntp.ubuntu.com
server ntp1.jussieu.fr
server ntp.obspm.fr

Then the NTP daemon has to be restarted so that the modifications are taken into account:

service ntp restart

and the time servers list can be checked by:

ntpq -p

Additional information : Ubuntu NTP documentation.

Backup FTP configuration

Connecting to the manager interface, a FTP backup can be activated and used to save some files (up to 100 Go).