Ubuntu Installation

Linux Installation

Ubuntu Server Minimal install

There are lots of linux distributions out there, and any one will work. Choose the distribution that you're most confortable with. These days, I typically use Ubuntu.

Partitioning

Here's my typical partitioning scheme for web application servers. The goal is to have web applications on their own partition, and to maximize the amount of space for web applications. We still want to have a reasonable amount of space for user home directories, but we don't need to create a seperate partition for that.

Linux filesystem standards recommend using /srv for data served by this server. This seems the best place for web applications. We used to put them in /var/www but there was always the danger of wiping that partition when rebuilding the machine with that directory already mounted. So now, we use /srv instead of /var/www.

• swap 2G
• / 8G
• /var 4G
• /srv ~all available

Ubuntu Post-install

After doing a minimal ubuntu installation, here's the base set of stuff that we have the distribution install. These are only the packages needed to deploy a release. There are additional packages needed if you want to compile your uReport release as a developer.

sudo apt-get install ufw ntp language-pack-en gettext default-jre imagemagick xsltproc \
apache2 libapache2-mod-php \
mysql-client mysql-server libmysqlclient-dev \
php-common php-cli php-mysql php-json php-readline php-mbstring php-intl php-curl php-ldap php-xsl

Firewall

All machines should use their own firewall. Only open ports necessary for each individual machine. Ubuntu uses the UFW program to administer the iptables. Remember to enable UFW!

sudo ufw default deny
sudo ufw allow ssh
sudo ufw allow http
sudo ufw allow https
sudo ufw enable

NTP

If you're like us, you'll have a few NTP servers that are local for you that you'll want to add to the configuration.

sudo nano /etc/ntp.conf

# You do need to talk to an NTP server or two (or three).
server ntp.ubuntu.com

Timezone

On a fresh install, sometimes, the timezone is usually not set correctly. You'll need to change this before NTP will pull in a correct date. We're using America/Indiana/Indianapolis.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Now, you can stop NTP, update the date, then restart the NTP service.

sudo service ntp stop
sudo ntpdate ntp.ubuntu.com
sudo service ntp start

Good to go

At this point, you have a relatively small linux server all set up and ready to start putting whatever server applications you want to use.

If you're doing this on a virtual machine...at this point, I typically quit out of the VMWare console and ssh in to my new virtual machine. Doing all this over ssh is much faster than dealing the VMWare's console.

If you're doing this on a physcial machine, this is where I typically log out and rack the machine. Or just unplug the monitor - at this point it can run headless, and ssh is more convenient than standing in front of some server in the benchroom.