Introduction

The purpose of this short guide is to present the standard steps needed to turn a freshly provisioned server into a nicely working machine, easy to manage and enough secure to trust into the wild realms of the Internet.

The process of specifying the remote server and selecting the appropriate hosting provider is out of the scope of this document, so please refer to other sources for such aspects.

This documents assumes that you have just contracted a remote server from your provider and it is running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with the most basic configuration.

Now, enjoy the ride!

📄️ First Access

Just after your hosting provider makes the server available to you.

📄️ Create Users

Once you are logged in the remote server.

📄️ External Tasks

As the name suggests, these relate to services needed around to the machine.

📄️ Check Connectivity

These internal aspects of the server refer to the settings which allow connecting to the Internet.

📄️ Internal Tasks

These remaining aspects refer to the internal checks to do and tools to install in the server itself.

📄️ Harden Security

Finally, the machine will appreciate some protections against security risks and external threats.

📄️ Basic Maintenance

Keep in mind to revisit these aspects periodically.