Gaining Access to Configure Your VPS

Gaining Access to Configure Your VPS

Primary configuration access will be by SSH terminal session, although we will also be installing webmin, which is a point & click method of administrating and configuring Linux.
The most common workstation platform is Windows, so this tutorial will assume that you will be accessing your Linux VPS from Windows. For SSH from a Windows workstation I normally recommend PuTTY as a SSH client. PuTTY is free and has the largest installed base of any Windows terminal client.

PuTTY is readily available for download by searching at Google.com, so download & install it now.
With PuTTY installed, open PuTTY and enter your VPS IP address into the Host Name box. Select SSH, which should change the port to 22. Give it a name (My VPS, for example) in the Save Sessions box and click the Save button, which will allow future sessions without the need to reenter your IP address. Now click the Open button to start your session.

Login as root, then enter the password you requested when you opened your VPS account. It should look like this.

HINT: PuTTY supports pasting, not by Ctrl-v or Edit Paste but by right-clicking the mouse. This feature will save you a mountain of work when following an install or configuration recipe with long text strings to enter. Simply copy (Ctrl-c) the text from the recipe, then right-click once in PuTTY to paste the text string. Make sure to verify pasted text, since it sometimes converts hyphens (-) to periods (.).

ANOTHER HINT: Linux file names are typically very long, so that file names can be as descriptive as possible. While that’s a handy feature for verifying that you have the correct file & version, typing long file names can be tedious. Linux therefore includes a feature called “tab completion”, where you can type part of an existing file name, then press the tab key to have Linux enter the rest for you.

ONE MORE HINT: If you don’t already know, everything in Linux is case sensitive. In other words, the filename test.txt is different from the filename Test.txt, and unlike Windows both of those filenames can coexist in the same directory as unique files. If you type a filename with the wrong capitalization, it will tell you that the file does not exist. Just so you know…

FINAL HINT: You can copy & paste from this document if you wish using Acrobat Reader, even though this is a pdf file. That will save you a ton of typing.

Now that you are logged-in to a terminal session the first thing you will want to do is download and install webmin, so that you can minimize your time on the command line. To do that, type these commands and press Enter after each line (I’ll try to keep the latest version of webmin at that simplified download link, but since webmin automatically updates itself it’s not that big of a deal if it’s an older version).

# cd /tmp
# wget http://entomy.com/webmin.rpm
# rpm –ivh webmin.rpm
With webmin installed, go to your VPS IP address at port 10000. So if your IP address is 123.123.123.123 then your webmin address is:
http://123.123.123.123:10000

Login to webmin as root using your password. You will see some options to do some updates, but leave those alone for now. It’s better if you do your updates later. I’ll tell when to do that.
Things are arranged somewhat differently with the various webmin themes. You can select any theme that you wish when you are done with this tutorial but just so we are both on the same page we’ll both need to use the same webmin theme. To change themes, click on “Webmin Configuration” in the upper left, then open the Webmin Themes icon. On the Change Themes tab, change it to MSC.Linux Theme, then click the Change button. You may need to restart webmin to see the new theme.

# service webmin restart

Now reload the webmin page. Webmin should now look something like this.