❖ Server Configuration and SSH

❖ Operating System

The target server should be running Debian 12 or above. The Install Images provided by Debian include a Graphical Installer, and a TUI installer as well. Feel free to use whichever one you are more comfortable with.

❖ SSH

If you don't have ssh keys set up, please take a look at the Github Docs on the topic.

Your ssh config should should look something like this:

# ~/.ssh/config

host <homeserver>
  HostName <internal-ip-of-server> 
  user <non-root-user>

host *
  AddKeysToAgent yes
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

The password authentication can be skipped by adding your public key to your server. You can do so manually by placing it in the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file on your server. Or you can use the following command to do it for you:

ssh-copy-id <homeserver>

❖ Sudo User

For the sake of security and to generally make our lives easier, we will not be logging into the server as root. The Debian Installer should have guided you to create another user. But just in case it didn't, if you're already logged in as root, you can create a new user by running the following command:

adduser <username>

Once we have another user, we need to give that user sudo privileges. On Debian, sudo is not installed by default. We will run the following commands to install sudo and give our user the proper permissions.

apt install sudo                  # Install sudo
usermod -aG sudo <username>       # Add sudo permissions for our user

❖ Laptop Configuration (Optional)

If you are using an old laptop as your server, we want to make sure that the laptop does not go to sleep when the lid is closed. We can do so by following the steps below.

Open /etc/systemd/logind.conf in your preferred text editor

sudo vim /etc/systemd/logind.conf

Uncomment and set the HandleLidSwitch option to ignore

HandleLidSwitch=ignore

Restart the systemd daemon:

sudo systemctl restart systemd-logind

Taken from ask Ubuntu