This may sound crazy, but I am using a laptop as a server. This post talks about turning on the tools I have enabled, some of the script I run on startup, and how I secured my system.
I will be locking this Laptop down as it is my personal device and I do not want any data exposed. I plan to do this by securing SSH access, using a VPN, and reducing the number of ports the device opens.
Turning on SSH
By default a desktop ubuntu setup doesnt have [OpenSSH] installed, so I ran a sudo apt update && sudoa apt upgrade && sudo apt install openssh-server to install the application. I then enabled the ssh server, started it and checked the status of it wit the systemctl commands. An example of the systemctl command would be sudo systemctl status ssh, note the service is called ssh and not openssh-server.
Enabling X11 Forwarding for Desktop Applications
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/215558/why-am-i-getting-this-message-from-xauth-timeout-in-locking-authority-file-ho https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/412689
Mac XQuartz
Mac has stopped shipping out X11 clients with their MacOS, so I installed the XQuartz application to allow my personal mac to run display applications from the laptop-server.
After ssh’ing into the server, run an xclock to check if everything is working properly.
Security
https://askubuntu.com/questions/115940/how-can-i-setup-ssh-so-that-it-is-restricted-to-my-local-network https://askubuntu.com/questions/31069/how-to-open-a-file-manager-of-the-current-directory-in-the-terminal/31071
Scripts
- Script to open the VPN Connection?/Looking into creating an OpenVPN Daemon to connect
- Script to “enable” and “disable” the server mode of the laptop. This would turn off all services that are used for the server applications (SSH, VPN Connections?)
Virt Manager
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/13/html/Virtualization_Guide/chap-Virtualization-Remote_management_of_virtualized_guests.html