How To Set Up Your Own Server on Linux Ubuntu 12.04

Introduction

About Ubuntu

The Ubuntu Server 12.04 in my opinion is one of the easiest to download and install out of all the Linux family of operating systems. Ubuntu has great documentation and community support which is referenced in the resources section of this tutorial. Ubuntu Server, like all of the other distributions of Linux is free for download. If you don’t have a copy yet, head over to http://www.ubuntu.com/download/server to get your copy now.

About This Tutorial and Its Lab

This tutorial will show you how to install Ubuntu with an OpenSSH Server, DNS Server, LAMP (Web) Server, Mail Server, and File Server. Configuration of the OpenSSH Server, DNS Server, LAMP (Web) Server, Mail Server, and File Server will come in later tutorials.

Some things you will need in order to run this lab is either a physical machine or a virtual machine. If you want to run a virtual machine you can visit http://www.virtualbox.org and use Oracle’s Virtual Machine Manager to create and configure a new virtual machine.

This tutorial also requires that you have a network connection to the internet and assumes that you have DHCP in your environment provided by a router or server. If you plan on running your Ubuntu Server from a physical machine, you may want to remotely connect to the server. In that case, head over to http://www.PuTTy.org where you can download the free telnet/SSH client.

This tutorial is for educational purposes. It is not intended to be a production web server and includes no warranties. This tutorial does not take responsibility for any misgivings or damage done while building the Server. Remember, this is just a lab.

Quick Resource List Before You Continue:

Installing Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS (Long Term Support)

Virtual Machine or Physical Machine?

Before installing the Ubuntu Server, you should decide whether you want to do the installation on a virtual, or physical machine. Installing on either the physical or virtual machine will have its benefits and downsides. If you install Ubuntu on a virtual machine, then you are unable to take advantage of the Ubuntu Virtual host, which allows Ubuntu to be the host server for other virtual machines. Using a physical machine would require a spare physical machine, which also renders the server to lose the convenience and efficiencies of being a virtual machine. Either way, the decision will likely depend on the available resources. If you want to create your lab in a virtual environment and don’t know where to start, I posted a great tutorial on using VirtualBox in order to create virtual machines.

Burning or Mounting the ISO

You can either choose to burn or mount the Ubuntu Server ISO file. In order to burn a copy of the Ubuntu Server, you should be able to pop in any CD-R with 700 MB of space and burn it to disk. After burning it to disk, make sure that your CD-ROM drive is listed as the first boot sequence in your physical machine. Otherwise, if you prefer the virtual environment, you can mount the ISO in your host drive. If you are using Oracle’s VirtualBox, you can mount the ISO in your host drive once the First Time Run Wizard starts.

The Ubuntu Server Installation Guide

After deciding upon your environment (virtual or physical), you will now be guided through the Ubuntu Server installation. If you are building your Ubuntu installation in a virtual machine, you will want to mount your ubuntu ISO file, otherwise put your CD/DVD into the drive and set the boot order in the BIOS to boot your CD ROM drive first. You will then get a screen with that prompts you to select a language. Select your desired language.

Select Install Ubuntu Server. The other options here are for diagnosing system defects and for recovering broken systems.

Once again, you will be prompted to select your language.

Now, you will be prompted to select your country, territory or area. This will be used to set your time zone and selecting system locale for devices such as the keyboard.

The next screen will ask you if you want to have the system detect the type of keyboard you have. It’s probably best that you select no and choose your keyboard from the list. If you select yes, then you will have to enter a series of keys so that the system can determine your keyboard type.

The next option you will be prompted with is a host name. This is much like the computer name you would give a Windows based computer. I named my server UbuntuWebServer because I will be focusing on tutorials for designing a web server that can support content management systems like WordPress, Joomla!, and Magento.

The next screen will prompt you for your full name. You don’t really have to give your full name but applications like e-mail and other things will use this in their configuration.

The next screen will ask you to enter a user name. This is the account you will use to log on to your Ubuntu Server and perform most of the actions with.

After you enter your user name you will be prompted to enter and re-enter a password.

Next, you can decide whether you want to encrypt your home directory. This isn’t the main directory of the hard drive, but it is the directory of your account.

The next screen will detect your physical location and ask you if it is correct. If it is not correct you can change it from the list.

The next screen will ask you how you would like to partition your disk. You can choose between use entire disk, use entire disk and setup LVM, and use entire disk and set up encrypted LVM Manual. LVM or Logical Volume Manager is used for resizing disk partitions easily as needed and managing large disk farms. In this tutorial, we will select to use the entire disk only without using LVM at this time.

The next screen will show you the available hard disks you can choose to partition.

The next screen will ask for your confirmation to partition and write the changes to the disk.

If you need to use a proxy to access the internet you can enter it on the next screen.

The next screen will ask how you would like to receive updates. You can choose to let the system update automatically with security updates, choose to have no automatic updates, or manage the system with Landscape (the graphical user interface of Ubuntu).

At the next screen you can install all the software you want. For the sake of this tutorial and future tutorials, we will select to install the OpenSSH Server, DNS server, LAMP Server (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), Mail Server, and Samba file server. You can go ahead and choose others if you’d like, for example the Tomcat Java Server.

Because we specified that we wanted a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySQL, & PHP), we need to enter a password for the root user of the MySQL database.

If you chose to install the mail server software, you will see the next screen which will ask you to select a configuration type that best meets your needs. At the moment we will leave it at No configuration as this will be explained in later tutorials.

The next screen will ask you to install the GRUB boot loader to the master boot record. The Grub boot loader pretty much tells your computer/server that it is the only operating system on the disk and will only load that. If you are loading this from a virtual machine, it will not affect anything outside of that virtual machine.

The next screen will let you know that your installation has been complete. Congratualtions! You have now successfully install Ubuntu and you can restart your computer to begin the login process.

Conclusion

Now that you have successfully installed your copy of Ubuntu, you can begin to play around in it and get a little comfortable. You can use Ubuntu for a wide variety of tasks and solutions. It can be a web server, file server, VPN server, and a host of other applications. To find out more about your Ubuntu installation, review the resources below.

Ubuntu Resources

Related Resources