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Log into a server

Billy Charlton edited this page Jun 30, 2017 · 2 revisions

« Back to Recipes for typical tasks


Use ssh to log into any of the virtual machine (VM) servers; ssh was installed on your machine when you installed Git.

The basics

For server maintenance, you will want to log in as the administrator user.

  • ssh administrator@[servername]
  • Chien has the administrator password for each VM.
  • Most dangerous commands will need to be prefixed with sudo to ensure that you really want to do them. It will then ask to verify the administrator password once again.
    • e.g. sudo reboot

Web front-end VM's

You can log into the web front-end machines prospector and 'prospector-extra' as the user sfcta, which will allow you to edit/remove the files that are served by the web server software, NGINX.

  • ssh sfcta@prospector will log you in
  • Web server files are all in the /www folder, which is the default home dir for the sfcta user

Some useful server commands

  • sudo apt-get update - Fetch the latest software update catalog (but will not actually install anything)
  • sudo apt-get upgrade - Upgrade all available packages. Note that security updates are already set up to install automatically, including kernel and reboots if needed.
  • sudo reboot - reboot the server right now
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