You just registered a VPS account. What should you do now to use your VPS?
General notes
- First, login to your control panel. The URL of the login must have been sent to you by email, together with login and password.
- Click on the VPS tab (on the tree view (user menu) on the left). It will show the current status of your VPS.
- If the VPS is currently reinstalling, wait until it's finished. You can refresh the screen by clicking on the VPS tab again. It shouldn't take more than few minutes to install normaly.
- After the VPS is installed, it's normaly not started, it's up to you to do that job by clicking on the xm start button. It might have been started by your host if they checked the setup (in that case, the xm start button is not present, and you will see only both shutdown and destroy button).
- Once your VPS is started, you should login using the physical console. To do so, you must first setup a physical console password using the control panel (it's initialised randomly at the begining). The password change is at the end of the screen of your VPS in the control panel.
- Once done, ssh using: xenXX@nodeYYYY.gplhost.com for example (if the VPS provider is gplhost.com), where XX is your VPS number and YYYY the physical number at your VPS provider.
- You will then be prompted for the physical console password you have just setup. Once entered, you might think nothing happens. That's normal, the buffer might be empty. Just press enter once more and you will see the login prompt, as if you where in front of a real Linux server (the TTY).
- Enter "root". Normaly there is no password set by default.
- Set the root password NOW (by typing passwd. In CentOS install passwd before with "yum install passwd")
- Now you can setup the sshd server so you can login using ssh rather than the physical console that is limited in lines and columns (and that have other bad restrictions). Under Debian, you do this by first typing "apt-get update" and then typing "apt-get install ssh". Under CentOS, it's "yum install openssh-server".
You are now ready. Logout using CONTROL-D or by typing "exit". Then exit the physical console by typing ^] (which is CONTROL-]) or by simply closing the ssh window (putty, x-term, secure-crt, whatever...).
Then now ssh to root@your-ip-address and you are good to go!
Things NOT to do with your VPS
- Do not setup ntp / openbsdntp or anything that will set the clock. First, your VPS doesn't have the rights to do it, and moreover, it's totally useless as we already run ntp on the dom0, to keep the clock with the correct value.
- Do not change the port of your ssh server. Two reasons for that. First, we do sometimes need to login in your VPS, for maintenance. Changing the port leads to not knowing what port to use, meaning we would need to bring your VPS down to get in, or that you would need to give us your root password. Second, the standard ssh port 22 is protected by our anti-DoS dtc-firewall script, that rate limits connection attempts to 5 connections each 10 seconds globally for all VPSes of the server. By moving to a non-standard port, you are also moving it away from this protection. Especially, running sshd on the port 2222 is extremely stupid. First because it's an unprivileged port, so a USER can bind on this port, preventing your sshd to run, and second, because it seems everybody is using this port, so it's easy to guess anyway. AT LEAST, if you really need to change the port, make it on a port lower than 1024...
- Do not disable root logins. While this might be considered as a security risk, in fact what you should do is disable password logins, and use only ssh keys. This way, even if somebody gets your /etc/passwd by a hole in a software, it is unusable and no password can be cracked. In other words, do not use:
PermitRootLogin no
but instead use:
PermitRootLogin without-password
so the staff of GPLHost can continue to log into your VPS if maintenance is needed. Note that we DO respect your privacy, and wont log into your VPS unless maintenance is done. If you remove our ssh key, or change PermitRootLogin to no, we can STILL access your VPS, remember we got the dom0 access and can do anything with your VPS. But we would need to shut it down first in order to change the sshd config. This takes unnecessary time and forces a reboot that would otherwise not be needed. You've been warned, don't complain if we have to reboot your VPS multiple times for maintenance...
- We highly recommend you to keep your root password in sync with the password that you use in your control panel for the management of your VPS, that way we always know what password you are using if we need to do some maintenance and need to log using the physical console (if, for some reason, login through ssh doesn't work).
Note for Debian users users
Once you got your VPS started, and you are in the shell of it (using the ssh physical password, see above) simply type the following:
- passwd (change your root password)
- apt-get update
- apt-get dist-upgrade
- apt-get install ssh
This will update your VPS to the latest security patches of the Debian distribution, and will install the ssh server and client. Later on, you can login directly using the ssh server of your VPS.
Note for CentOS users
DTC-Xen uses yum to setup the VPS. It's a minimal setup, and even the passwd utility is sometimes (in older versions of dtc-xen) not present. But it's quite easy to add it. Here are the few commands that you shall type in to initialize your VPS:
- yum install passwd
- passwd (type in your root password twice)
- yum install openssh-server
- /etc/rc.d/init.d/sshd start
From there, you should be able to log into your VPS directly using the ssh server in your VPS.
Notes for NetBSD users
The setup for NetBSD is NOT based on a script to do the setup, meaning that your VPS will NOT be installed by our script. You will have to process the setup by yourself using the NetBSD-install kernel. Follow these steps:
- Shutdown your VPS
- Select NetBSD as operating system, and click on reinstall
- Select the install kernel and press ok
- Boot up your VPS
- Connect to the physical console as see above
- Proceed to the installation using the NetBSD installer
- When done, click on the "xm destroy" button. The shutdown one wont work when running the NetBSD installer
- Choose the normal kernel instead of the install one
- Boot up your VPS
You are now done!
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