Ubuntu 14.04 Server Installation Guide and Setup LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)With the release of all Ubuntu 14.04 flavors on April 17 2014 including Ubuntu for Phoneand Tablet products, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, had also released Server,Cloud and Server Core Editions with a five years long term support guaranteed on software and updates until April 2019.

Step 1: Installing Ubuntu 14.04 Server1. Create a bootable CD/USB image. After system booting sequence choose your media bootable type from BIOS options ( CD/DVD or USB drive ). On the first prompt choose yourLanguage end hit Enter.

Select Language

2. On next screen choose Install Ubuntu Server and hit Enter.

Install Ubuntu Server

3. Next select your System default Language and also Installation process Language.

Choose Language

4. If your country is nor listed in default Location options choose Other, select yourContinent and then your Country.

Select Your Location

Select Continent

Select Country

5. Next select your locales, Try choosing a general one like UTF-8 encoding so later you won’t have problems with keyboard.

Select Locals

6. On next prompt configure your Keyboard – again on servers you should choose a general keyboard Language. Also in this stage the installer can automatically detect your keyboardLayout by pressing a series of keys so be advised to choose No and setup English as default language.

Select Keyboard

Select Keyboard Language

Select Keyboard Layout

7. After some additional software components are loaded for the installation process to continue. if your server is connected to network, and you run a DHCP server on your

directly connected network the installer automatically configures network settings with ones provided from the DHCP server.Because a server offers public or private network services, the network setting (especially the IP address) must always be static configured.

Loading Additional Components

Configuring DHCP Network

8. If you get the same result on network hostname prompt press Tab key, choose Go Backand then Configure network manually.

Enter Hostname

Configure Network

9. On next prompt series enter your network interface settings: IP address, netmask, gateway and DNS name servers.

Enter IP Address

Enter Netmask

Enter Gateway

Enter Name Server

10. Setup your system hostname – you can also enter your FQDN. Be advised to choose your system hostname wisely and unique because some programs highly depend on this.

Enter Network Hostname

11. Now is time to setup your administrative user. On Ubuntu this user replaces the rootaccount and has all root account powers by employing sudo. Enter your username and hit on Continue.

Enter Full Name

Enter User Name

12. Enter your password twice and for security reasons you should always choose a strong one on servers ( at least 12 characters including upper, lower, numerical and special).

Enter Password

Re-enter Password

In case you used a weak password the installer will alert you. If you are on a test server then choose Yes and continue further.

Password Verification

13. If your server contains sensitive, secret or important data on Users home partition the next screen offers the option to secure all data by Encrypting home directory. If this is not the case choose No and hit Enter.

Encrypt Home Directory

14. If while installer runs and your network interface card has Internet connectivity the installer will automatically detect your Location and setup your correct time zone. If the provided time is not correctly setup you have the option to choose it manually from a list else choose Yes and press Enter.

Configure Time Zone

15. The hard-disks Partition table is one of the most sensitive subjects involving a server because here you have a lot of tweaking to do depending on your server final destination type web server, databases, file sharing NFS, Samba, application server etc.o For example if redundancy, fail-over and high-availability is needed you can

setup RAID 1, if your space grows fast you can setup RAID 0 and LVM and so on.o For a more general use you can just use the Guided option with LVM, which is a

customized option made by developers.o For a production environment you probably should have LVM, software or

hardware RAIDand separate partitions for /(root), /home, /boot and /var ( the /var partition has the most fast growing rate on a production server because here are logs, databeses, applications meta info, servers caches and others located.

So on Partition Disks choose Guided –user entire disk and set up LVM -> select your disk to partition and accept partition table.

Partition Disks

Select Disk Partition

Write Changes to Disks

16. After the partition table has been written to disk the installer once again prompts you with a partition review. Accept the Partition Table and hit Yes.

Confirm Write Changes to Disks

If you like to make some changes to this Partition Table you can select No and edit your partitions.

Partition Overview

17. After all hard-disk partitions had been written to disk the installer starts copying data software to disk and then reaches HTTP proxy option. If you don’t access Internet through a proxy leave it blank and Continue.

Installing System

Configure Package Manager

18. Next the installer scans the CD image for software packages and reaches Updatesoptions. Choose No automatic updates because on servers you should try manual update the system.

Configure Apt

Configure Tasksel

19. Now the base system is installed but the installer invokes tasksel package which helps you to install some server packs before finishing. For a better control over your server choose only OpenSSH server by pressing Space bar key while others will be installed and configured later and choose Continue.

Software Selection

20. The selected packages are being installed while the last option is displayed on your monitor demanding to Install GRUB to MRB. Because the system can’t boot on his self without GRUB, choose Yes.

Install GRUB

21. Once the GRUB boot loader is installed the installation process reaches it’s end. Remove your media installation drive (CD/DVD,UDB) and hit Continue to reboot.

Finish Installation

GRUB Boot Menu

Congratulations! Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Server edition is now installed and ready to rock on your brand new metal or virtual machine.

Step 2: Basic Network ConfigurationsFor now only the Core server packages are installed and you can’t really offer network services for your network.In order to install software login to your server console for now and verify some basic configurations like network connectivity, settings, startup daemons, software sources, updates and others by running a series of Linux commands.

22. View system load and basic information – After login with your credentials this information is presented by default MOTD. Also top and htop commands are useful.

Login Screen23. Verify network IP addresses using following command.

# ifconfig –a

Verify IP Address24. Verify internet connectivity: run ping command against a domain name ( this will test TCP/IP stack and DNS ).

# ping –c 4 google.ro

If you get “unknown host“ message, edit your ‘/etc/resolv.conf’ file and add the following.

nameserver your_name_servers_IP

Add Name Servers

Confirm Name ServersFor permanent changes edit ‘/etc/network/interfaces‘ file and add dns-nameserver directive.

Add Network Details25. Verify machine hostname using following command.

# cat /etc/hostname

# cat /etc/hosts

# hostname

# hostname –f

Verify Hostname26. To enable or disable init daemons on run-levels install and run ‘sysv-rc-conf‘ utility which replaces chkconfig package.

$ sudo apt-get install sysv-rc-conf

$ sudo sysv-rc-conf

Services27. To start, stop or verify a service (daemon) run the following commands.

# sudo service ssh restart

# sudo /etc/init.d/ service_name start|stop|restart|status

28. See server processes, open connections ( listen state ).

$ ps aux | grep service-name

$ sudo netstat –tulpn

$ sudo slof –i

29. To edit software repositories, open ‘/etc/apt/sources.list‘ file.

Edit RepositoriesImport new repositories keys with the command.

# sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys key_hash

30. Update system.

# sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 3: Install LAMP StackLAMP acronym stands for Linux OS, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB databases, Php, Perl or Python programming languages used for generating dynamic webpages. All of this components are free and Open-Source software and are suitable for building dynamic websites or other web applications and are the most used platforms on Internet today (Last year Apache was estimated to serve over 54% of all active websites).

31. LAMP can be installed step by step or using just one single command.

$ sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 php5-mysql mysql-client mysql-server

While is installing enter and confirm mysql databse password.

Enter New MySQL Password

Repeat Password

32. To confirm php status create a ‘info.php‘ file in ‘/var/www/html’ server path with the following content.

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

33. Then open a browser and enter your server IP address orhttp://server_address/info.php.

Apache Default Page

PHP Information

Ubuntu 14.04 and LAMP is an excellent platform to deliver network services, develop all kind of dynamic or static websites, complex web applications with the help of Apache CGI, all of this made with a minimum financial impact using Free and Open Source software and the latest technologies.