set up a Linux server for beginners

[00:00] People think that Linux servers are really complicated and that you need like a degree in technology in order to know how to operate a Linux server, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

[00:12] In fact, all you need is this video. So, that being said, we're going to talk about a handful of stuff today. We're going to discuss why you need to set up a Linux server at home, what it can do for you.

[00:24] We're going to talk about what distribution to choose. I'm going to show you how you can install it on your own hardware, and then I'm going to give you some tips and tricks for operating the machine post-installation. So, all that being said, let's dig right in.

[00:45] You're probably wondering, why do I need a Linux server at home? What's the point of that? Well, there's two main reasons why you may want to consider this. First is the most universally accessible, which is cost savings.

[00:59] If you have a Linux server at home, then you can host some of your own services. It's called self-hosting, and you don't have to pay a dime for them. So that's one of the main reasons why you might want to set up a Linux server at home.

[01:13] The other thing that might make you want to set up a Linux server at home is the fact that it's a really good training tool. Like, if you're interested in getting into IT, one of the best things you can do is set up a home lab.

[01:28] A home lab is just a bunch of old hardware, a bunch of free hardware you get, whatever you can get cheap or easy. You take that stuff, you stand it up as servers, and then you build, you break, and you fix.

[01:41] It's a pretty simple idea, but it's something that really, really propels your IT career forward. Some of the best advice that I ever got was from the first sysadmin I worked with.

[01:54] He said, Patrick, you need to take your strongest computer and set it up as a home server. And I said, why? That seems pointless. Isn't that a business thing? How naive I was.

[02:07] And then he was like, no, no, this is how you learn. This is how you level up in IT. And he was right. He wasn't right about a lot, but he was right that time. Alright, so you've figured out that you want to run a Linux server.

[02:21] It's probably why you clicked on this video. So you might be wondering, okay, which distribution do I choose? Because there are as many Linux server distributions as there are atoms in the universe.

[02:34] Like, you're spoiled for choice. So I'm going to make this easy. If you're just getting started with Linux, and you want something that's going to work as much as possible,

[02:46] stick with Ubuntu Server. Now, people often say not to recommend Ubuntu, but they're talking about the desktop version. Ubuntu Server is truly the gold standard for server operating systems.

[03:02] It's the most compatible with all the stuff you might want to run, and it's the Linux server distribution that you're going to see in guides when you look up how to do things. So I think that if you're just getting started,

[03:15] a Bung 2 server is an excellent choice. Now, if you're wanting to get a little more enterprise-y, a little more business-grade, you might go with something like Red Hat. Now, look, boo, hiss, I know, I know,

[03:29] I don't like Red Hat either. But the fact of the matter is, is they make the most enterprise-friendly operating system for servers. If you're looking to operate Linux servers at scale in a business environment,

[03:41] then honestly, despite the bad stuff about Red Hat, it's probably best that you learn that tool. Or Rocky Linux or Alma Linux, any of the orbiters of the Red Hat ecosystem.

[03:55] Just pick one of those if you're really interested in enterprise-grade stuff. Ubuntu server, you'll see Ubuntu server in the enterprise too, don't get me wrong. It's just that Red Hat has a lot more security and compliance stuff baked into it

[04:10] that really streamlines stuff like government compliance. Okay, so you've picked your Linux server operating system that you're going to use. You've got maybe an old laptop or an old desktop, and you want to set that up as a server.

[04:26] So here's what you have to do. I'm going to walk you through the whole process. First, you need to take that desktop or laptop that you're sacrificing, and you need to hook it up to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

[04:38] And then, let's switch over to my computer screen, and I'll show you what you need to do from there. Okay, so the first thing you need to do is to actually download the operating system you're going to use.

[04:50] That's pretty straightforward. You're just going to go to ubuntu.com slash download slash server, and then you're just going to download the latest long-term support, 24.04.2 at the time of recording.

[05:04] So we've got that downloading. So what we're going to have to do is take this disk image that we've downloaded and put it on the computer that we're going to be installing Linux on.

[05:18] So in order to do that we need a thumb drive and a piece of software called Elena Etcher. We're just going to download Etcher real quick. I'm on Mac OS. Oops I on Mac OS ARM 64 right now Okay now we got those two things downloaded So what we do from there

[05:39] so what we do from there is we run Blaina Etcher. So you just execute that, pretty straightforward. And then you're going to take the file that you just downloaded, you just click that and then select the file. Then we're going to select the target that we're installing it to,

[05:53] so that'll be our thumb drive. And then we're going to hit Flash. What that's going to do is it'll take the Ubuntu server operating system we downloaded, and it will put it on the thumb drive and make it so that a computer can start up off the thumb drive.

[06:09] And that's what the flashing process does. Okay, so this next part, I can't really show you exactly what to do, because it changes a little bit depending on what brand of computer you're doing this on.

[06:21] But basically, the idea that you need to figure out right now is that you need to take your thumb drive, plug it into the server, or the computer you're turning into a server,

[06:33] plug your thumb drive in, and then you need to tell that machine that it needs to start up off of the thumb drive. Now, this can be achieved by hitting a specific button whenever the computer is first starting up.

[06:47] Here's the problem. That button changes depending on who made your computer and when they made it. So, look up for your computer model. Look up boot menu for this computer model.

[07:02] And that will tell you exactly which button to press in order to get to the boot menu. And then from the boot menu, you need to choose the sub drive. I'm afraid I can't help you more than that. This is going to be the most challenging part of this situation for new viewers.

[07:19] But just trust me, if you can handle that part, you'll be all set. Okay, so we're switched over to my virtualization system just for the sake of showing you what buttons to click. So this is what you're going to see on your screen after you get your computer to boot up off the thumb drive.

[07:35] So you'll see it's asking us what language we want to use. We're going to use English. Just pick your favorite from the list. Then it's going to ask us what keyboard layout to use. We're going to leave that on default. Okay, and at this stage it's asking us if we want to install Ubuntu Server or Ubuntu Server Minimized.

[07:53] We're going to leave that on the default, Ubuntu Server. Minimized is useful if you're doing a completely hands-off server installation. So like if you're never going to actually log into it, but rather manage it with infrastructure as code.

[08:07] In that circumstance, you might want to pick Ubuntu Server Minimized. But for 99% of the time, you just want Ubuntu Server. There's this option for third party drivers. If you're running an Nvidia card on your server for whatever reason, you want to select that.

[08:24] So we'll hit done on this screen. Then it's going to ask us about our network setup. So this is important. So you always want your server to have the same IT address. By default it's going to grab a dynamic IT address through something called DHCP.

[08:43] Essentially this is the network protocol that allows you to assign IP addresses out to client systems. So your router, by default, is going to be sending out an IP address for your server to use.

[08:58] But we don't want that. We want to use the same IP address at all times. We don't want it to change. So we're going to hit enter on where it says Ethernet here. Then we're going to go down to edit IPv4 and then we're going to hit enter and change this to manual.

[09:14] So this is where it gets a little bit tricky. You're going to have to fill out your subnet address. So that for me is this 0 slash 24. Yours is probably the same thing if you're doing this from home.

[09:27] Then we need to actually give the server an IP address. So I'm just going to give it 217. That'll work. Then you're going to enter your gateway. This is the router. My router is at .254. Yours might be at .1. Then we need to pick name servers.

[09:48] So with this, if you're going to be setting up a lab with more than just a couple systems, you probably want to set up a DNS server. DNS is the domain name lookup system.

[10:02] Essentially, instead of having to memorize a bunch of IPs, you can give friendly names to your servers. So when you navigate to them or interact with them, you're using their friendly name, and then the network figures out what IP address goes to them.

[10:17] Obviously if this is your first server you're setting up you're not going to have that. So just give it something like the default Google DNS servers or Cloudflare, whatever your flavor of choice is.

[10:29] Search domains we're going to leave empty. We'll hit save and it's going to make sure that that configuration is valid. And as long as it says that everything checks out you'll see the done button. And you can hit that to continue.

[10:42] Proxy address we're going to leave blanks. We can just hit done. Then it's going to test and make sure that it can actually reach the servers for running updates. Updates are critical. You should be updating all your systems all the time.

[10:57] If there's a new version of software out, you should update to it, provided that it's not in beta. So that tested and confirms that it can reach the servers that host updates Now it going to ask us how you want to use the internal hard drive or solid state drive whatever you got

[11:15] So the default is use the entire disk. We're going to leave that enabled here. And then the second option, set up the disk as an LVM group. LVM is logical volume management.

[11:28] I personally don't like that on simple systems so I'm going to turn that off. Just know that it makes expanding and shrinking disks easier is the main use case.

[11:41] Obviously if this is your first Linux server you're probably not going to do that so we'll just hit done here. Then it's going to give us a summary of everything that we've set up. Once we're happy with it we can hit done and then continue and this is going to write the changes to the disk.

[11:57] disk. Now we have a few questions to fill out. First means enter our name. My name is Pat. Our server will be called Video02. Username will be Pat. Super Secret Super

[12:11] Sature Password. Now this is asking us if we want to enable Ubuntu Pro. Ubuntu Pro is basically extended support for your Ubuntu systems. I don't really use that so we'll

[12:24] skip it. Just know if you plan on running your system for more than a few years, a month to pro is probably worth it. This is very important. So you're going to want to install the OpenSSH server. So we'll hit space bar to turn that on. Don't worry about anything

[12:40] else right now, but just know that without turning that on, you're not going to be able to connect to your server. We'll hit done there. Now it's asking us what software we we want to preload on the server. I'm going to hit done without selecting

[12:53] anything, but just know that if you're trying to use a specific piece of software and it happens to be in that list, then go ahead and select it and install it. Just saves you time after the fact. Okay, so this is what the screen is

[13:07] going to look like whenever the installation is finished. I'm just going to hit reboot now. So at this point what you want to do is take your computer, take your laptop, unplug it from the screen, unplug it from power, and then take it over next to

[13:21] your router. What you want to do is plug in an ethernet cable from your router into the server, and you want to plug in power to the server. Then you're going to hit the button

[13:34] to turn it on, and then you will walk away. And, uh, I'll jump back on my machine and I'll show you what happens after this. There we go. You should be able to see that. So our Our server is rebooting right now and we're going to pretend that we just walked it over

[13:48] to our server rack and plugged it in. So now, okay, so you've got your server, it's plugged into power, it's plugged into the network, what do you do from here? Well, we need to connect to it from another computer in order to do anything.

[14:05] What you want to do is open a terminal window. It's called PowerShell if you're on Windows or just Terminal. If you're on a Mac OS, it's called terminal. If you're on Linux, it's probably called terminal.

[14:18] So what we're going to do is, in this text-based interface, we're going to manipulate the server. So the first thing we have to do is actually connect to it. We're going to do that with the command SSH.

[14:31] This stands for secure shell. Basically, a shell is the thing that you interact with on the computer. And this is a secure way to interact with the computer, secure shell.

[14:45] And it happens over the network. So you probably guessed since it's happening over the network, this is why we need the server's IP address. So I'm just going to type my server's IP address in.

[15:01] And do you know what? I screwed up. Do you know why? Because first, before the IP address, we have to put our username. See we put the username we picked, at, and then the server's IT address.

[15:13] So I'm just going to hit enter. I got the IT address wrong, look at that. Okay, so, uh, some developments. Uh, so something with my network configuration is stopping me from SSHing into that new server we set up.

[15:30] So instead of sitting here and poking at that for 30 minutes, because I have a needlessly complicated network. I'm just going to show you the other stuff on another machine, but if you followed all the steps up until this point,

[15:44] everything should work for you. This issue that I've run into is purely on my end. So once you connect to your server, you're going to see this. A command prompt, just a little bit of text, and the ability to type stuff in.

[15:58] This is how you're going to interact with your server. So the first thing you want to do is run updates. Here's how you do that. You do sudo, and sudo is basically telling it to do it as an administrator.

[16:12] Like in Windows, when you would run something as administrator, that's what sudo does. So we're going to do sudo apt, and apt is the packaging system. Basically, in the Linux world, applications and software are distributed through packages.

[16:31] Packages of software can contain one or multiple projects worth of code and these packages are the unit which the operating system designates for tracking software So we going to put some packages on the system meaning we going to install something In this circumstance we installing updates

[16:49] So we're going to do sudo apt updates and then we're going to get a little bit tricky. So that's one command right there sudo apt update and what that will do

[17:02] is update the repositories listing of software and that's not actually going to update the computer though, that's just going to update the list of software that the computer is aware of. So we're going to do a second command, and you can do two commands

[17:16] on one line if you type and and between them. So where it says pseudo apps update, that's one command, and then we're going to do a second command after that, which is going to be pseudo apps upgrade, and that's the difference here between these two commands. One is update,

[17:35] which will simply refresh the list of software. And the second one, upgrade, this is what's actually going to upgrade everything, get it up to date. And then I'm going to add tachy.

[17:48] So that's a very interesting bit right there. So when you see a tach in a shell script, that's basically passing along an argument. An argument is something that you can supply to a command

[18:01] that will modify the behavior of that command. The reason I added "-y", to this command, is to indicate, yes, I want to upgrade everything. Otherwise, it's going to ask me to hit yes to upgrade everything, and tack-wise it skips that.

[18:17] So let's go ahead and run that command. On your machine, it's going to ask you for your password. You'll just type in your password. You will not be able to see it, but don't worry, it is accepting it as you type it in.

[18:29] So just type in your password and hit enter and send these wonderful commands you're going to run and your server is going to be completely and magically up to date.

[18:43] Okay, so once your screen looks like this, you'll know that everything has finished when you're able to type stuff in again. Now I want to show you a handful of useful things here. If you hit the up arrow, you will see that the previously typed command gets pulled up there. If you hit the up arrow again, it shows you the one before that.

[19:04] So that's a very simple way in which you can pull up the commands that you just ran. The reason that's useful is because often you'll get something wrong when you type a command out, and instead of typing the whole thing again, you can just hit the up arrow

[19:19] and then make whatever changes you want to make there. Another command that you should be aware of is clear. So if I just make a mess here on the screen, I can type clear, and that clears out the

[19:31] screen for me. One thing that you'll want to be able to do in the command line is navigate around the file system. So Linux has a bit of an interesting file system. It's different than what you'll see in Windows or Mac OS.

[19:45] So we're going to use the command CD, which stands for change directory, and then slash. So what did we do there? We changed directory. We changed the folder that we're working inside of, and we changed it to the folder slash.

[20:01] So now in our prompt right here, you'll see that it has that slash in it. That means that we're in the root file system. What is the root file system? It's basically the C drive on Windows, right?

[20:15] This is where everything lives. So if we do ls, which is to list all files, and then we do tach la, and that's two arguments, right? Remember, when you see the tag, that's an argument, that's a modifier on the command.

[20:32] And we're doing two of them, L and A, standing for list view and all, meaning including hidden files. So if we click that, or hit enter on that, you'll see that it lists everything that's in the root file system.

[20:47] So when you're done booting around the file system, you probably want to get back to your home directory. Basically in Linux the home directory is the area where the user account that's signed in can have full control over everything.

[21:03] So in order to do that we're going to do cd and then the squiggly line, the tilby. So what does that do? So well if we do pwd which prints the working directory, you'll see that we are in the root folder.

[21:17] That is this account's home folder. And we can also validate that by seeing the squiggly line right there. The squiggly line stands for home, and since we're root right now, slash root is, remember

[21:31] slash is the C drive, so we're in the disk and in the root folder, and that's this account's home folder, hence the tilde. Okay, so hopefully that gives you a pretty good idea of how you can get started with

[21:45] your Linux server. If you want to see some examples of different services that you can stand up, then leave a comment down below. I'd love to make a follow-up video to this one showing you some of the first projects that you might want to take on

[21:57] And if you enjoyed this video as always a like or subscribe would be greatly appreciated My name is Sid and Patrick really grateful. You took the time to watch my little video today

[22:09] I'll catch you in the next one and leave me alone