How to setup your Cloud Server securely

7 security layers to setup your cloud server securely

To run any node i.e. Cardano node or Ethereum validator on cloud server you first need to setup the server securely. To setup the server securely these are the following seven settings I have sorted out and found to be the most important settings.

I am having double boot operating system with Ubuntu 20.04LTS and Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit as my operating systems. I prefer Ubuntu as my preferred operating system for running the node server. For this setup guide I will use Windows PowerShell to access the cloud server running on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. I use my local Ubuntu OS to access only my Cardano nodes.

First go to any cloud service provider and create an instance/server. Then from your local computer use SSH client to connect your remote cloud server. The default login/username is always 'root'. At this stage you also must have root password to login to your remote server. So the CLI format to connect your remote server is:

ssh root@<ip address of your remote server>

PS C:\WINDOWS\System32> ssh root@5.189.149.230

You will see the following message once while connecting to your remote server. Type yes and press enter to accept it.

Server IP address is added to the list of known host. Now enter password to get access to your remote cloud server.

So now we are logged in to our remote server with root password. This method of accessing server is not secure and we need to change it by disabling root login and password that we will see later.