12 Things do to after just started your DigitalOcean VPS

Recently I helped one of my client to setup a VPS on DigitalOcean (DO). The price is very competitive (the cheapest plan is $5 per month) and they offer SSD as the storage. I highly recommend to give a try if someone is looking for a virtual hosting.

Actually a VPS is just a server running on other location. Once you subscribe a plan and start to OS, it's your responsibility to maintain the system.

The steps below are to enhance the security once the server is deployed ( we are using Ubuntu 14.04 in this case). The objective is to harden the server so that it can only be accessed from a client with ssh

1. Setup ssh keyfrom a linux server at home or office. Assumed you have a linux client with a user "user1"

Benchmarking of Hard disks on N54L using Bonnie++

Getting the hard disk details

First we use smartctl to get the details, you can see there are 3 disks. 2x WD Green 2TB 5400rpm and 1x HP 500GB 7200rpm. The HP one is bundled and I think it's not enough for me to store my data So I buy the WD disks and make it as a mirror.

#smartctl -i /dev/sda
smartctl 6.4 2015-06-04 r4109 [x86_64-linux-3.14.51-1-lts] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-15, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Western Digital Green
Device Model:     WDC WD20EZRX-00D8PB0
Serial Number:    WD-xxxxxxxxxx
LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 6055d1735
Firmware Version: 80.00A80
User Capacity:    2,000,398,934,016 bytes [2.00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    5400 rpm
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-2 (minor revision not indicated)
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Fri Sep 11 17:09:32 2015 HKT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

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