Deploying a Linux Web Server for Windows Admins

Course Overview
Hi everyone. My name is Ryan Shultz, and welcome to my course, Deploying a Linux Web Server for Windows Administrators. I'm an enterprise architect at a data and managed services company, as well as a freelance consultant. I have over 19 years of IT experience that includes storage, virtualization, systems, Linux, Windows, and UNIX web design and multimedia development. As a Windows administrator, you are oftentimes asked to create and administer platforms you don't have experience in. Trying to build a new platform with little or no previous experience can be a daunting task, especially if the platform is as disparate as Linux is from Windows. In this course, we will learn how to deploy an Ubuntu server and install web services. Some of the major topics that we will cover include: Prepare the test environment; install the Ubuntu server instance; perform basic server configuration; configure your web services; and then troubleshooting. By the end of this course, you will be able to start with your bare metal server, or virtual instance, and build a fully functioning Ubuntu server running web services. Before beginning the course, you should be familiar with the basic concepts and administration of virtualization platforms. I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn about Linux and installing web services with the Deploying a Linux Web Server for Windows Administrators course, at Pluralsight.

Install and Configure Apache Web Server
Install and Configure Apache Web Server. Let's look at the install best practices. First you need to decide on the packages to install. Only install the packages that are required for your needs. What this does is it helps to keep our security footprint, our attack surface, smaller, so that when we do expose our server to the open internet, if that is the goal, we don't have to worry as much about the packages that are installed and keeping them secure. The less packages we have, the less we have to patch and update and the smaller your attack surface, or your attack footprint is. The most common deployment is going to be a LAMP deployment. What do we mean by LAMP, L-A-M-P? That means Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. During our initial installation, we went ahead and selected to do a LAMP install. We don't have to do any other installations at this point for our configuration. If you were to build your server from scratch and did not choose to install LAMP, there are multiple guides online to help walk through that process. You would simply install Apache, install MySQL, and install PHP, separately, as individual packages. You can still follow the same configuration process that we'll go through in the demo. Basic LAMP Configuration. Since we already included the packages for LAMP when we built the server, we don't need to install individual packages at this point. But we do need to create the MySQL database structure, secure the MySQL instance, and then finally, validate the services are configured for startup at boot.