Linode Getting Started Guide | Linode Cloud Manager Walkthrough

so you have yourself a brand new account on lenode and you're probably wondering how you get started and maybe you even have some questions about the platform so i've prepared this video as a starting point for those of you that are getting started on lenode and we're going to dive into some general information that'll point you in the right direction so let's get started [Music] now what you see on the screen right now is the lenot dashboard and this dashboard can be used for all kinds of things including but not limited to spinning up a new server accessing a console for that server installing apps from the marketplace managing your backups and the list goes on there's quite a few things that you can do here so what i'm going to do is create a brand new instance right now and you can see right here i'm on the section that is cleverly named lenodes and i don't have any lenovo servers on my account at all right now so what i'm going to do is click this button right here to add a new linux server and once you do that you have this screen right here and there's several options here that you can use to set up your server exactly the way you want it on this first tab we have the distributions tab and on this tab we can create a brand new server using one of the images that are available by default so here we have the images section and in my case it's defaulted to debian 10. and if i drop this down you can see that we have quite a few distributions of linux that we can choose from to serve as the starting point for our new lenode server so for example we have alpine we have arch linux which is very awesome a bit advanced it's a rolling distribution that you basically install once and then update forever so it's going to need a little bit more maintenance than some of the other ones but it's still a great distribution and of course we have centos here as well core os three versions of debian a handful of versions of fedora gen2 even which is awesome slackware ubuntu and opensuse so basically you just choose a distribution from this list that is a good starting point for what you want to achieve debian 10 is an excellent choice also ubuntu we have several versions here so for example ubuntu 2004 is a great choice i'll leave that up to you so you choose a distribution i'll leave it at debian 10 and then if you scroll down you choose your region and i'll leave it on atlanta you choose your instance plan and as you can see here different plans have a different amount of memory a different number of cpu cores so you just choose a plan that has the amount of memory and cpu that closely matches what your application requires the application that you want to run in your linode server and that'll serve the basis for your decision i'll just choose the now node right here which is the lowest price instance that you can get at five dollars a month five us dollars a month and then if you scroll down you could give your lenode a label a descriptive term about you know what you want it to run or something that identifies its purpose i'll just call mine debian instance and then you add the password for the root account that you will use to access your instance and optionally you can enable backups which i highly recommend you do if your linux server is important so that way if you make a mistake you have a way of going back to a previously working configuration and it gives you the amount that the backup service will cost for that particular plan right next to it but you simply follow through and fill out everything on this page and click create and then you'll have yourself your very own server after you give your new server a few minutes to finalize and boot up it should be ready to go and you can confirm that by clicking here where it says launch lish console and this just shows you what would be on the screen of your server if it were a physical server but accessing this console is essentially the same thing as plugging in a keyboard and a display to your server it shows you what's on the screen and allows you to interact with it so for example i could type in root that's the username and then the password and then it lets me in now the lish console is pretty good for seeing what's on the screen of your lynnode instance but the industry standard is ssh that's the way that almost everyone connects to linux servers to manage them and it's also the way that i recommend you connect to your lynn note as well now thankfully we already have a video on the channel that tells you how to access your lenote instance via ssh so definitely check out that video for more information on that but that is a question that comes up for most newcomers how do i connect to my instance once i have it created and that's the answer ssh and it's possible that you have created your linode server because you want to host a website and if that is the reason why you've created your lynnode then that's a great reason because you could definitely do that and there's several ways that you can host a website on lenode all the staples are available for example apache and nginx we have guides on those things as well and it's extremely easy to host a website on your lenode and one way that we can do that is by installing a web server such as apache nginx is another way that we can host a website as well there's multiple different ways that we can do this and in the case of debian and ubuntu we can just use simple package management commands to install packages and we have guides on package management as well if you want to learn more about that but right here i have the console open so let's install a web server i can run apt update and what that'll do is just refresh the list of available packages and then after you run that you can run apt install and then the name of the package that you want to install and in my case it's going to be apache 2. that's the name of the package for apache specific to debian and ubuntu again check the package management article out on the wiki if you want to learn more about how to do that so i'm just going to accept all the defaults i'm installing apache right now and now that apache is installed i'll close the console i'll copy the ip address and then i'll just go ahead and paste it right here in a new tab and we have the apache default start page which shows us that we are already hosting a website on our lenode it's publicly available anyone that has internet access will be able to access this page right here and yeah it's just a default web page it's nothing special but you can actually replace this webpage with your actual website and then you'll be good to go and then you'll be hosting it on your lynnode server and on the lenode website we have a docs section and inside there we already have guides that will teach you all about apache and nginx so if you want to learn more about how specifically you host a website with apache for example where you put the files for your website and check out that guide to learn more about that and another common question that comes up from newcomers is whether or not you're able to have outgoing email from your lenode that can be sent to your inbox for alerts and things like that and you can absolutely do that now setting up an outgoing email server is beyond the scope of this video however we already have a guide on the docs page that'll teach you all about how to do that with post fix so definitely check that out if that's something that you want to set up now another thing that you should really pay attention to is the marketplace if i go there you'll see that there's all kinds of apps that are pre-configured that you can choose to install and yeah it's a lot of fun to manually configure something at least i think it is but if you want to get something set up quick then this is a great way to do that because on the marketplace tab here you can see we have several awesome things that we can run on our lenode so for example if you want to run a minecraft server you can absolutely do that you can click here to actually create a minecraft server instance that is pre-configured for that purpose if you want to set up a vpn server for example we have a pre-configured instance right here this image if you create your instance with this image we'll actually make it an open vpn server from the get go and that'll greatly minimize the amount of configuration that you have to do to get it going same with discourse and as you can see there's all kinds of different things here that you could choose as your starting point which will save you a lot of work so you as the user can decide if you want to set it up manually or if you want to do it quickly and use a pre-configured instance that will save you a bunch of time you could definitely do that too so what if you want another ip address so in my case i have this debian instance right here and this is the ip address that was assigned to my instance and this ip address is publicly available but perhaps you want another ip address so if you click on your instance and then here we have a network tab and you know maybe one ip address isn't actually enough maybe you need another one and the reason why you might need another ip address really comes down to your configuration and what you want to achieve if you do require a second publicly available ip address you will need to provide justification for that in order to get that set up but you could absolutely do that if your configuration requires that all you should have to do is submit a support ticket and just let them know what your needs are and they will work with you but here let's go ahead and add another ip address and then we'll select ipv4 type and i'm going to create a private ip here i'll allocate that and you can see we have a brand new private ip address here on our lenode and that's something you can absolutely do if you need a backend network or a private network for various purposes maybe a messaging system in between your different lynodes or some kind of internal networking there's quite a few things that you can actually do with this but i was able to easily add another ip address as you see here so if you want to set up private networking for whatever reason you may need that for you could do that right here through the dashboard and as you can see you have all the options that are related to networking here on this tab but in addition to that on the same tab if you need to set up reverse dns you can easily do that right here actually there's a dedicated button next to your public ip address that you can click on and you can set up your own reverse dns and that might be important for the application that you are running we do have a video already that goes over that it teaches you how to actually add a domain to your account so you can actually give your lenode a fully qualified domain name and then here you can give your lenode server a reverse dns to match that which is definitely something you should do if you are utilizing dns and they make it easy because the button was right here right here next to the public ip and there's all kinds of things that you can do on the dashboard i just showed you the lenode section as well as the marketplace which is a great way to get something set up quickly and easily but we also have a section for images so you can create your own image and as you can see i actually have a few here and these are custom images that i can use to actually deploy a new linode so essentially you can set up your own server with all the defaults that you want and create your own image and then use that image to spin up additional lenovo servers it's very easy to do that and you can click on the button that is labeled deploy new lenod if that's something that you want to do we have a video that is dedicated to domains like i mentioned you can add a domain to your account and then you can attach that domain to one of your servers it's very easy to do we have the kubernetes engine which is awesome if you want to set up some containers and benefit from that technology it's very easy to do that we have object storage as well so if you want to store files and things like that you can create your own bucket in object storage and then you can upload data to that bucket you can choose to have it publicly available or private it's up to you now hopefully what i've gone over in this video helps you guys get started with lenode and has maybe answered some of the questions that you might have had about the platform but we also have some additional videos that you should definitely check out if you want to learn more for example we have an entire video on how to use ssh to connect to your instances among many other videos that you should definitely check out we also have some amazing videos coming very soon so stay tuned but in the meantime thank you so much for watching [Music] you

Channel: Linode

Views: 13,471

Keywords: linode, linux, cloud computing, alternative cloud, linux server, open source, sysadmin, linode cloud manager, linode tutorial, get started on linode, getting started with linode, linode free credit, linode dashboard, linode tutorial walkthrough, linode server setup, linode review, linode free trial, linode interface, cloud computing tutorial for beginners, learn linux, learn linux channel, cloud server setup, linux server linode, linode vps, linode getting started, server

Id: KEK-ZxrGxMA

Length: 14min 16sec (856 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021