Packages and Programs¶

This is a list that contains a number of useful packages and programs that will become helpful when using the server.

Screen¶

Screen is a wonderful tool capable of improving multitasking on a single shell window with the ability to background processes. It also lets you recover shell windows when there's a connection loss.

Installation¶

Installing screen is as simple as running the following command:

sudo apt-get install screen

Usage¶

At first it may seem a little complicated and maybe even intimidating to use this tool but once you get used to it you'll realize how useful it really is.

First start up screen by typing:

screen -S <socket name>

Here's a table with the keys and actions you can use with screen:

To reattach to a screen:

screen -r <screen pid>

or,

screen -rd <screen socket name>

VirtualBox¶

VirtualBox is a machine virtualization tool which has the option to run in headless mode (pretty useful in this case), which directs all display and controls through an RDP connection. Not only can we run some VM's to run certain services that may need a dedicated environment, but we can also "portabilize" these servers, making it easier to back them up in case something goes wrong.

In this case we'll use a VM to manage our router in a graphical environment without the need to install a DE or WM on the server (since we want it to remain headless). This VM doesn't require to run 24/7 and ends up being pretty useful considering the only alternative would be to forward X11 through SSH which is unstable and literally unusable in high latency connections.

Installation¶

Firstly we need to install some initial packages and reboot the server.

sudo apt install build-essential dkms
sudo reboot

We now need to add the VirtualBox source to our apt sources and refresh them.

sudo echo "deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian bionic contrib" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update

Right before the installation we need to install Oracle's public key.

wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

We're ready to install VirtualBox.

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-5.2

Before creating/running our VM's we'll need to add our user to the vboxusers user group. (Replace $USER with your username.)

sudo adduser $USER vboxusers

We're not there yet, we still need to install the extension that will let VirtualBox run a VRDP server so we can use the VM remotely through an RDP connection. Download the VirtualBox Extension Pack corresponding to your version from Oracle's official site. To check your VirtualBox version, run:

vboxmanage --version

Copy the link and download through wget and install. (Keep in mind the example may show a link incompatible with your VirtualBox version).

wget https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/5.2.16/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.2.16.vbox-extpack
sudo VBoxManage extpack install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.2.16.vbox-extpack

Creating a VM¶

Creating a VM is done through a series of commands, the process can be a little long to write so keep an eye of what you're about to input in your terminal window. As an example we'll install Lubuntu 18.04 64-bit. Download the iso file and keep it somewhere (for example in ~/Downloads).

Before we begin, we need to see what is our network interface, which is usually called eth0 enp0s3 wlan0 etc, depending on how many interfaces the server has or interface type. To see your interface name type in console:

ifconfig

You should receive an output similar to this one:

enp0s3: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.0.15  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.0.255
        inet6 ::a00:27ff:fe49:8561  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x0<global>
        inet6 fe80::a00:27ff:fe49:8561  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
        ether 08:00:27:49:85:61  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 755025  bytes 1132393073 (1.1 GB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 94785  bytes 9330879 (9.3 MB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

In our case enp0s3 is the name of our interface, it may be different for you.

Now we begin. Feel free to change whatever to accommodate your needs.

VBoxManage createvm --name "Lubuntu" --register
VBoxManage modifyvm "Lubuntu" --memory 2048 --acpi on --boot1 dvd --nic1 nat --vram 128 --cpus 2
VBoxManage createhd --filename ~/VHDD/Lubuntu.vdi --size 10000
VBoxManage storagectl "Lubuntu" --name "IDE Controller" --add ide
VBoxManage storageattach "Lubuntu" --storagectl "IDE Controller" --port 0 --device 0 --type hdd --medium ~/VHDD/Lubuntu.vdi
VBoxManage storageattach "Lubuntu" --storagectl "IDE Controller" --port 1 --device 0 --type dvddrive --medium ~/Downloads/lubuntu-18.04-desktop-amd64.iso
VBoxManage modifyvm "Lubuntu" --vrde on

That's it, the VM is ready to be used, but before we go ahead and run it, we need to add some firewall rules so we can access the VRDP server.

sudo ufw allow 3389/tcp

Running the VM¶

You can start your Headless VM with the following (keep in mind to replace with your own VM name):

VBoxHeadless --startvm "Lubuntu"

To control your VM, connect to your server's IP through a RDP client. (Remote Desktop on Windows, for example)

Should you need to power off, reset or suspend your VM, use the following:

VBoxManage controlvm "Lubuntu" poweroff
VBoxManage controlvm "Lubuntu" pause
VBoxManage controlvm "Lubuntu" reset

Others¶

These are other packages which may be required by the services that run on the machine.

sudo apt-get install lib32gcc1 ranger unzip wget thunar