Setting Up An Ubuntu Server

Provision The First User

It’s not a good idea to use root so let’s set up the main user.

Create the user:

$ sudo adduser tim

Add the user to the sudo group:

$ sudo usermod -aG sudo tim

Verify sudo access by switching to the tim user:

$ su - tim

Then, check if sudo access works by running a sudo command, like listing the root directory:

$ sudo ls /root

Now let’s make sure that you can ssh in as that user. First let’s switch to the tim user if we haven’t already:

su - tim

Create the .ssh directory (if it doesn’t already exist) and set the appropriate permissions:

mkdir -p ~/.ssh
chmod 700 ~/.ssh

Add your ssh key which is found in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub:

echo "your-public-ssh-key" >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Then set the appropriate permissions:

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

and you can exit and then try to ssh in as tim.

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