Create a User On The Server

addUserToSever.md

Let's create a new user and then setup some security.

• New User

# login first
sudo adduser zymawy
# Create password
# Skip extra field
# Set Y to save the new user

# Become new user zymawy
sudo su zymawy

# Head to home directory
cd ~/
# See the file path
pwd # /home/ubuntu

• Setup SSH Key Authentication We can re-use the SSH key we created to allow us to log in as user root.

On our Mac, we can get the public key into our clipboard again:

# On our host (Macintosh):
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | pbcopy

Then over in the server, add that public key to user zymawy's authorized_keys file:

Logged in as user zymawy

cd ~
mkdir .ssh
vim .ssh/authorized_keys

Paste in the public key

• Disallow Root Login First, we want user zymawy to be able to use sudo commands, so we don't need the root user to perform administrative tasks.

Sudo user

We can do this easily in Ubuntu by adding the user zymawy to the group sudo or admin (More explanation on that within the video).

# Append (-a) secondary group (-G) "admin" to user "zymawy"
usermod -aG admin zymawy

Then log out, and log back in as user zymawy and you'll be able to use sudo commands.

Next, let's secure our server further and disallow root login.

Configure SSH

Now that user zymawy can do administrative tasks (things requiring super user access), let's edit the SSH daemon configuration to change this.

We'll do two things:

Disallow password based authentication Disallow root user login Do to that, we update the file

/etc/ssh/sshd_config 

and change the following:

# Disallow root login over ssh
PermitRootLogin no

# Disallow password authentication
PasswordAuthentication no

Then restart the SSH daemon:

sudo service ssh restart

And you're all set!