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Set Up the Virtual Machine

To start the JupyterHub deployment process, we need to set up an Ubuntu 18.04 server and configure key login.

• Set Up the Virtual Machine
  • Add an SSH Key
  • Log into the server over SSH
  • Setting up a new user
  • Configuring the firewall
  • Next Steps

Add an SSH Key

The public SSH key we created needs to be added to the list of authorized keys for login to our server. To do this, open a terminal and enter the following commands (we will assume the server is called m09vm14.ma.tum.de and accessible from the network you are in):

ssh m09vm14.ma.tum.de
mkdir ~/.ssh
cd ~/.ssh
vim authorized_keys

This will open the vim editor with the file authorized_keys. Press the button i to enter insert mode, paste the contents of the clipboard (the public key), then press esc and :wq to save the file and quit vim. Note the IP address of the new droplet. We need to IP address to log into our server with PuTTY. Copy the IP address of the droplet to the clipboard.

Log into the server over SSH

Open a terminal and enter the following command to see if you can connect to the server:

ssh -i ~/.ssh/jupyterhub_rsa ritter@m09vm14.ma.tum.de

You should now see the server prompt as user ritter. First, let's make sure everything is up to date:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade

Setting up a new user

If you want to set up additional users at this point, you may do so with the adduser command. I called my new user peter.

$ adduser peter

Set a new password and confirm:

Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully

The user details can be skipped by pressing [Enter]. Then [Y] to complete the new user setup.

Changing the user information for username
Enter the new value, or press ENTER for the default
    Full Name []:
    Room Number []:
    Work Phone []:
    Home Phone []:
    Other []:
Is the information correct? [Y/n]

Now let's give our new user sudo privileges:

$ usermod -aG sudo peter

The new user account is created and the new user has sudo privileges. We can switch accounts and become the new user with:

$ sudo su - peter

The new user peter should have sudo privileges. This means when acting as peter we should be able to look in the /root directory.

$ sudo ls -la /root

If you can see the contents of /root, then the new user peter is set up with sudo access.

To exit out of the new sudo user's profile, and get back to using the ritter profile, type exit at the prompt. Finally, log out by entering the following command:

$ exit

Configuring the firewall

Next, we need to open the ufw firewall to OpenSSH traffic. We we'll communicate with the server over SSH and need the ufw firewall to allow this type of communication through. While we're at it, let's also open ports 80 and 443 for http and https communications.

$ sudo ufw ddefault eny incoming
$ sudo ufw default allow outgoing
$ sudo ufw allow ssh
$ sudo ufw allow http
$ sudo ufw allow https
$ sudo ufw enable
$ sudo ufw status

We can see that ports 22, 80 and 443 are allowed.

Status: active

To                         Action      From
--                         ------      ----
22/tcp                     ALLOW       Anywhere
80/tcp                     ALLOW       Anywhere
443/tcp                    ALLOW       Anywhere
22/tcp (v6)                ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)
80/tcp (v6)                ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)
443/tcp (v6)               ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)             

Now we can exit out of the ritter profile. This terminates the SSH session.

$ exit

Next Steps

The next step is to install Python and JupyterHub on the server. In particular, we will create a virtual environment, and install JupyterHub into the virtual environment.