Building A Custom Server

Photo by Florian Krumm on Unsplash

We all know the old saying :

“If you want to create fire from scratch you must first create the universe”.

In my case I had a problem, I wanted to host my test node js server but I couldn’t find a cheaper or free host for the server. That’s when it hit me I have a laptop just laying around which I could reconfigure to be a server and since it was a weekend I thought this might be and interesting proces to undertake

This will be a series of blog outlining each step of the process

Hardware

My server hardware

My server hardware configurations are :

1. Intel cpu core i5
2. 16 Gb of ram
3. 256 Gb of ssd storage

That all that I require currently

Server Operating System

I will be running ubuntu server as it is stable, secure and it is obviously linux.

The recommended system requirements for ubuntu server are:

• CPU: 1 gigahertz or better
• RAM: 1 gigabyte or more
• Disk: a minimum of 2.5 gigabytes

You can download the server from ubuntu server page.

Creating A Bootable Disk

After you have finished downloading the iso file for the operating system the next step is to create a bootable disk. The bootable disk should be atleast 4Gb

If you are on windows I usually prefer rufus or etcher

For this blog I’m going to use rufus. The steps are as follows:

1. Download rufus from here

Rufus download

2. Run the executable

3. Open rufus

Open rufus

4. You are going to select your device and the boot selection

select boot selection

5. After you are done click start

NB: It is going to format your flash drive so backup and important data that you don’t want to lose.

And you are done you now have a bootable disk. Congrats upto this point.👏

Install Your Server Operating System

After you have successfully created your bootable disk. Plug it in to your computer

Next You need to select the device that you want to boot. The default in most computers is set to be the primary hard disk but in our case we want it to be our bootable flash disk.

In most hp computers press F10 when the computer starts and it will provide you with the list of devices that you want to boot from.

Select the bootable hard disk and it will provide you with a grub menu select install Ubuntu server. It will load up the server. Follow the prompts till the end.

After the installation process is complete you now have successfully installed an Ubuntu server. I know you will be shocked since it does not have a user interface. Oh dear windows user don’t fret I will be with you through the journey

In the subsequent series I shall take you through steps to:

1. Ssh into your server
2. Using cockpit to get your server analytics
3. Making your server accessible to the internet
4. Installing a graphics user interface in your server

That’s it for this episode. Hope you enjoyed tinkering around

Happy hacking 🎉🥳