Fresh Server Install – Ubuntu Server Edition

Your VPS offers you the possibility of a fresh installation, reinstall OS they call it. Do that. Use Ubuntu 10.10

Please note that I am no computer expert, I am telling you what worked for me.

The default installation of Ubuntu doesn’t have locale set. You will get “locale failed” variety errors when you install anything.

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = "en_IN"
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

More irritating than anything else. So we get rid of that.

apt-get install language-pack-en-base

If you get an error about missing package, etc. Run

apt-get update

and try again.

Then you may have to insert the code for your location.

/usr/sbin/locale-gen en_IN.UTF-8

and

/usr/sbin/update-locale LANG=en_IN.UTF-8

Irritants out of the way, this is the time to do any upgrades you may wish. I brought my server to the latest like so:

sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

Check that /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades has Prompt = normal (default) and run

sudo do-release-upgrade

I generally replace most configuration files with “vendor versions” – I haven’t actually customized anything so far.

This done, I am ready to move to the next step. I have decided on using Varnish as the cache, LAMP, APC opcode cache. I will also be using virtual hosts to host different domains, but that is last.

There is a reason for this sequence. If something messes up, I can click the reinstall button, and there is very little big effort gone into it. So, the tricky stuff comes before the time consuming stuff – as long as there is no dependency.