When you purchase a server (virtual or dedicated) from Intergrid with a Linux operating system installed, the first steps you should take are to secure the server by adjusting the configuration files. This will increase security and stability for your server.

Administrative Account 

Initially, you will be given a root user and password to access your server. The root user will have all administrative power over the server. It has a very broad set of privileges. Because of this, it is recommended to create a separate user account for administrative purposes. 

In order to create a new user, enter the following command:

# adduser username

Where username is your chosen username.

There will be a series of prompts but the important one there is the password. You should create a strong password consisting of alphanumeric characters and special symbols. To skip the other fields, just press ENTER.

Now that the user has been created, we need to give it root privileges. This is to avoid having to logout and use the root user account. We can enter higher privilege commands by adding sudo before every command.

In order to add these privileges, we need to add the user to the sudo group (Ubuntu/Debian) or wheel (CentOS/RedHat). Enter the following command:

# usermod –aG (sudo/wheel) username

Where username is your chosen username.

This completes the administrator account setup. Next is to setup SSH. You can refer to our tutorial for setting up SSH on your server in the knowledgebase.