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Linux Upskill Challenge: Day 0

🌱 🪴 ⏱️ 2 min read

Introduction

I’ve started following the Linux Upskill Challenge to sharpen my Linux knowledge and hands-on skills. It’s a series of 21 lessons designed to be completed daily, but I’ll be going through them at my own pace. I’ll share my journey and notes here as I move forward.

Day 0 - Get Your Own Server

  • I created an EC2 instance in an AWS account I already had.
    • Instance type: t2.micro
    • OS: Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS
    • Region: us-east-1
    • SSH key: linux.pem (AWS instances don’t use passwords for authentication)

Issue: When I created the key pair, I named it linux, but when it was downloaded to my computer, the file was called "EC2 Instance Key.pem".

Solution: I had to rename the key file from "EC2 Instance Key.pem" to linux.pem using:

mv "EC2 Instance Key.pem" linux.pem

Everything worked fine. Actually, the server doesn’t care about the file name—it only cares about the contents.

  • I connected to the EC2 instance using the ubuntu user and the public DNS. But first, I had to set the correct permissions on the key file:
chmod 400 linux.pem
  • Then I used the following command to connect via SSH:
ssh -i linux.pem ubuntu@<PUBLIC DNS>
  • After logging in, I ran both sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade to upgrade all pre-installed packages.

NOTE

The public IP and DNS of the server change every time you stop and restart the instance.

NOTE

I need to remember to turn off the server when I’m not using it to avoid being charged!
I used sudo shutdown now. This stops AWS from charging me for compute time, but storage (EBS volume) and the public IP (if static) may still incur charges.

Side Readings

This reading looks interesting: https://linuxjourney.com/lesson/linux-history

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