How To Use a Linux Virtual Private Server

Nerval's Lobster writes "Game developer David Bolton writes: 'For my development of Web games, I've hit a point where I need a Virtual Private Server. (For more on this see My Search for Game Hosting Begins.) I initially chose a Windows VPS because I know Windows best. A VPS is just an Internet-connected computer. "Virtual" means it may not be an actual physical computer, but a virtualized host, one of many, each running as if it were a real computer. Recently, though, I've run into a dead end, as it turns out that Couchbase doesn't support PHP on Windows. So I switched to a Linux VPS running Ubuntu server LTS 12-04. Since my main desktop PC runs Windows 7, the options to access the VPS are initially quite limited, and there's no remote desktop with a Linux server. My VPS is specified as 2 GB of ram, 2 CPUs and 80 GB of disk storage. The main problem with a VPS is that you have to self-manage it. It's maybe 90% set up for you, but you need the remaining 10%. You may have to install some software, edit a config file or two and occasionally bounce (stop then restart) daemons (Linux services), after editing their config files.'"

Comments

And your problem is .... ?

[gus goose]

.... you are new to Linux, and you need some help?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Beginners/FAQ

gus

Re:n00b

[omnichad]

Have you looked at Ubuntu Server Edition lately? They have an LTS version that's supported for 5 years of security updates without updating to a new distro release. Debian doesn't come close.

Re:Ahem

[Sparticus789]

Default install of Ubuntu-server is headless. You can type sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop and you will have a GUI.

Linux does have a RDP server

[bmsleight]

www.xrdp.org
Works very well.

Re:I'm actualy considering leaving Slashdot

[1s44c]

What has happened? It used to be so nice place to be.

I admire your long term memory. You remember 15 years ago like it was yesterday.

Re:Apt-get install clue

[TheCarp]

Oh and a couple of things I really should have mentioned.... save yourself some trouble, and make sure you have dos2unix.

Because I know you wont learn vi overnight (or do what i did and avoid it for several years), and you will likely find some shell extention that does sshfs or realize that you can use winscp to sftp into the box and then right click on a file and edit, or you will just copy a file locally and edit it, and reupload.

At some point, you WILL transfer a file that has the wrong line endings, and it will be one of the ones where it matters (there are many times it is not a problem, shell scripts are not one of them). The file command will often tip you off to dos line endings, and dos2unix will do the conversion.

If you want to move a file or several files from one unix machine to another, but have to copy to a windows machine inbetween.... make a tarball and move that instead.

Oh and always set putty and winscp to use blowfish as the first cipher....it speeds up file transfer times significantly over the AES default.

And always make backup copies of config files before you edit them. Consider installing git and using git for this purpose right in /etc

If nothing else, being able to do a "git diff" and see everything you have changed since the last commit will be inordinately helpful when making posts asking for help in online forums.