Providing geek access to our servers

These are instructions for providing a new geek with full access to our server(s).

Software

On access from Windows, try these:

• Putty: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ - provides shell prompt
• WinSCP: http://winscp.net/eng/index.php - provides file access

SmartFTP (paid) or FileZilla (free) are good FTP clients.

Create access key

Use puttygen to create public and private SSH keys:

• SSH-2 RSA, 2048 bits
• save the public and private keys -  ?no need for a passphrase on the private key

Add user

An existing geek needs to login and "sudu su" to root:

• Add a user:
  • adduser <user>
• giving an initial password
• Give them su permissions
  • usermod -G sudo -a <user>
• -G says add to your list of supplemental groups (as opposed to your primary group)
• -a says append, not replace the list of supplemental groups

 Login

The new geek will need to log in using putty (with username and password) then change their password so it's secret.

Set SSH Key

The new geek should set up logging in using SSH as it is more secure:

• mkdir /home/<user>/.ssh
• In that directory create file authorized_keys
  • in that file you put the public half of any SSH keys you want to use for password-less logging in, ie usually starting with ssh-rsa and ending with rsa-key-20100411
• You'll want to "chmod 700 .ssh" and "chmod 600 authorized_keys" (read/write only by user) to keep SSH happier.
• Set up putty and WinSCP to use SSH to login.  In both cases refer to your local private key file.
• You should now normally access the server using the SSH methods.
• Note that in WinSCP you cannot "sudo su" to root so some files will not be accessible.

You only put the public half on servers you are logging into. The private file always stays with you, so you can use the key pair (pvt/pub) to login to as many servers as you care to setup.

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