HEIMDALL
Managing your virtual private server
David Rutland wipes away a tear as he bids farewell to the semi-unofficial Linux Format VPS. He’s not sad about it, though – he suffers from hayfever.
Credit: https://heimdall.site
OUR EXPERT
David Rutland
thinks the world would be a better place if people would stick to their deadlines.
A ll good things must come to an end. Actually, that’s not true, there are plenty of things which were established decades, centuries, or even millennia ago and are still going strong: The Archers, the Tower of Jericho, peace in our time.
Regardless, this VPS series is coming to an end and this is the absolute final instalment. No longer will you be made to feel slightly guilty about relying on tech giants such as Google for essential services instead of booting up a VPS and hosting your own quirky, yet functional versions of well-known programs that will confuse your friends and relations. Hopefully you’ve had fun following along, and found something that suits your fancy enough to try it out yourself. If you’ve tried everything out then you’ll have noticed that this series has been remiss in one particular area: administration and management.
Staying up to date…
Most computer users – even most Linux users – have updates handled automatically on their desktop systems. Turn on your Ubuntu machine and there’s a non-zero chance of seeing a system pop-up telling you that either software has been updated, or has been downloaded in the background and is ready to update. Automatic security updates are difficult to turn off on the majority of recent Linux desktops, but this doesn’t tend to be the case with servers.
If you don’t create an admin user for Heimdall, it’s practically guaranteed that someone else will, and you’ll be extremely lucky if you only end up being rick-rolled.
Digital Ocean will handle weekly backups for you automatically, but the cost is only 20 cents less than the monthly cost of renting the VPS.
We’re sure that we don’t need to tell you of the necessity of keeping your software up to date, but we’re going to anyway. No software is perfect, and new security vulnerabilities are discovered every minute of every day. This can enable unscrupulous hoodiewearers access to your machine where they can wreak havoc, ransom your data and generally spoil your weekend. Software developers try to keep on top of these vulnerabilities, and when made aware of them will release an update to patch the software and keep you safe. Updates may also introduce cool new features you can show off to baffled bystanders.