Bootstrap and secure your server in 5 minutes flat. A riff on this excellent post:

http://plusbryan.com/my-first-5-minutes-on-a-server-or-essential-security-for-linux-servers

There's a blog post that I wrote to go along with this. Check it out!

http://practicalops.com/my-first-5-minutes-on-a-server.html

Run:

yourmachine$ ssh root@server

Enter the initial root password from your hosting provider, then run:

root@server# passwd

https://github.com/phred/5minbootstrap/

yourmachine ~$ git clone https://github.com/phred/5minbootstrap.git
yourmachine ~$ cd 5minbootstrap

Ansible needs to know about the servers you want to manage. There is no fancy central database, just a text file with a list of servers. Oh, it's called an "inventory file."

Edit the hosts.ini that came with the repository. Replace 127.0.0.1 with your IP address, and :2222 with your SSH port.

[newservers]
127.0.0.1:2222

yourmachine ~/5minbootstrap$ cp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub ./fred.pub

For simplicity I provided my public key in the repo. Unless you want to grant me login access to your server, you probably want to change that. :-)

This is the needed invocation for Vagrant:

yourmachine ~/5minbootstrap$ ansible-playbook -i hosts.ini bootstrap.yml --ask-pass --sudo

If you are logging into a fresh Linode, or another sytem where you only have the root user, you need to run this command:

yourmachine ~/5minbootstrap$ ansible-playbook -i hosts.ini bootstrap.yml --user root --ask-pass

I prefer hand-ground French pressed coffee myself. Tea is also fine.