Remote Administration
The first, and most useful bit of configuration you can do is around remote administration. I mean,
you can't be sitting next to your sever all the time – imagine if it goes down at 3am! I know I would
much rather get up and sit in my pyjamas at home than jump in the car and drive to my data
centre.
That being said, we need to ensure that we have secure methods of administering our servers
remotely.
SSH
SSH is a standard and secure method of administering servers remotely. This protocol enables you
to run commands directly in the server terminal and also enables you to shift files to and from your
server.
Open SSH (or equivalent) will already be installed on your Digital Ocean instances, enabling SSH
– but, just incase you have your own, completely blank server, please follow the below.
Open SSH is a freely available version of SSH is OpenSSH, which provides a secure and
encrypted SSH service to manage your servers. The way that OpenSSH works is it continuously
listens for clients trying to connect with it. When it hears a client shouting 'LET ME CONNECT!' it
authenticates the client and lets the user carry out their business.
Installing OpenSSH is simple:
1. sudo apt-get install openssh-client
2. sudo apt-get install openssh-server
Once all that is done you'll need to edit your sshd_config file. This can be done through the
terminal or it can be done by using an FTP client to download the file, make changes in notepad
and upload the file to the server again