4 Install The SSH Server
If you didn't install an SSH server during the basic system installation, you can do it now:
apt-get install ssh openssh-server
From now on you can use an SSH client such as PuTTY and connect from your workstation to your Debian Squeeze server and follow the remaining steps from this tutorial.
5 Install vim-nox (Optional)
I'll use vi as my text editor in this tutorial. The default vi program has some strange behaviour on Debian and Ubuntu; to fix this, we install vim-nox:
apt-get install vim-nox
(You don't have to do this if you use a different text editor such as joe or nano.)
6 Configure The Network
Because the Debian Squeeze installer has configured our system to get its network settings via DHCP, we have to change that now because a server should have a static IP address. Edit /etc/network/interfaces and adjust it to your needs (in this example setup I will use the IP address 192.168.0.100) (please note that I replace allow-hotplug eth0 with auto eth0; otherwise restarting the network doesn't work, and we'd have to reboot the whole system):
vi /etc/network/interfaces
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system # and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5). # The loopback network interface auto lo iface lo inet loopback # The primary network interface #allow-hotplug eth0 #iface eth0 inet dhcp auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 192.168.0.100 netmask 255.255.255.0 network 192.168.0.0 broadcast 192.168.0.255 gateway 192.168.0.1 |
Then restart your network:
/etc/init.d/networking restart
Then edit /etc/hosts. Make it look like this:
vi /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost 192.168.0.100 server1.example.com server1 # The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts ::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback fe00::0 ip6-localnet ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix ff02::1 ip6-allnodes ff02::2 ip6-allrouters |
Now run
echo server1.example.com > /etc/hostname
/etc/init.d/hostname.sh start
Afterwards, run
hostname
hostname -f
It is important that both show server1.example.com now!
7 Update Your Debian Installation
First make sure that your /etc/apt/sources.list contains the squeeze-updates repository (this makes sure you always get the newest updates for the ClamAV virus scanner - this project publishes releases very often, and sometimes old versions stop working).
vi /etc/apt/sources.list
[...] deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-updates main [...] |
Run
apt-get update
to update the apt package database and
apt-get upgrade
to install the latest updates (if there are any).
8 Change The Default Shell
/bin/sh is a symlink to /bin/dash, however we need /bin/bash, not /bin/dash. Therefore we do this:
dpkg-reconfigure dash
Use dash as the default system shell (/bin/sh)? <-- No
9 Synchronize the System Clock
It is a good idea to synchronize the system clock with an NTP (network time protocol) server over the Internet. Simply run
apt-get install ntp ntpdate
and your system time will always be in sync.