 Welcome everybody to this first server Academy of 2021 and the first online server Academy ever. I think we've got quite a lot of attendees. I think the registered number is up to 70. So this would be quite a, it's going to be quite an interesting one to manage. Let's start off by, first of all, just introducing myself and the program. And we'll talk a bit about the modality. So as well, who am I? My name is Bob. I'll be presenting the sessions for the next two days. I know quite a lot of you on here already, but those don't know me. I went to the University of Oslo in various roles, I suppose, primarily interested in strengthening country server implementations and issues around security and interoperability. I guess I also end up being sort of Chief Troubleshooter when people get into performance issues or other problems on their servers. I'm always reluctant to call myself any kind of expert, certainly not the expert. We've got a lot of people in this group who I know are very competent in various aspects of server administration and other things. There's a few notable folk I'd ask you to look out for on the slack. We've got even Alkaya from Hisp Uganda. Clement Dajo from Hisp, Western Central Africa. Morton, one of the lead developers in Oslo, Haime, who's the main Android developers. Travis from Hisp Nigeria and Tuzo from Hisp Tanzania and others. I just noted a few of the names coming in as I came in. So we've got a lot of participants and that raises some challenges of course, but I think also it's an opportunity to grasp because we can take advantage of the various skills that we have on here and during the course of the program. I hope that people will be able to help each other out as much as possible, rather than sending direct messages to me all of the time. So yeah, this is the first time we've ever tried to do this. It's a bit of a challenge. I've never done it before. I've certainly never done it before. So you'll have to bear with us as we as we make a few mistakes here and there. As a lot of participants, usually we do this Academy over a period of four or five days in a particular location, around about 20 people. It's kind of very intense. People with a virtual server to work on during that. And we have a lot of interaction after hours and things like that. This is going to be quite different. We've got more numbers. I know, even though we tried to make clear that this is not a beginner's introduction to Linux course. It's really a training for people who already experienced with Linux, preferably already managing the DHS to servers to introduce them to to. So maybe some additional ideas, perhaps up the skills, things like that. Yeah, so we decided that the primary means of communication that we're going to use is is slack. And I think Alice Martin should have added you to the to the slack. As part of your registration process. This is what we plan to do. Okay, the full program. We've decided to stretch it out over four weeks. That doesn't mean we got zoom calls every day. We're going to have today and tomorrow. A bit of orientation that's what this is. A couple of presentations and and a lot of a lot of demonstration. And over the next two weeks, then that'll be your opportunity then to practice yourselves on your own virtual server. Talk a little bit about that in a minute. Your opportunity to go through the material and practice yourself. Then we'll have another zoom call. Two weeks time. Where we have the opportunity possible to cover a couple more topics and we also have an opportunity to catch up with where people are with a practical work. Then we'll take a break again for another two weeks. Again, you can be involved in practical work what we usually do with the face to face academy. We suggest a few topics for for small projects which are aimed at kind of different skill levels. People can self select to have a go at doing some slightly more extended practical work. So we'll do that. I think in the in the following two weeks. And then we have an opportunity again for a final final zoom half day where if you notice on the program. I've actually left out the topics to be to be discussed in the first two sessions of that day. We can decide ourselves as a group over the next couple of weeks, which topics people want to go into more depth in. Or to explore further or things maybe we didn't cover sufficiently or run out of time. And we can fit in there. That's basically what we're going to do we're going to have a little bit of this as kind of synchronous presentation webinar kind of thing. But I think most of the actual work is going to be done in the in the time in between. So during that time. Hopefully, people will be able to discuss raise questions raise issues etc over the slack. If I talked a bit about the slack. Okay, we'll get about slack. But first of all, the server. I can see that Steven raised with me this morning already. There's been a rush of questions about about the server what do you need to be able to to do this. So what I've laid out here. What might be able to change this a little bit, but in order to complete the exercise in the same way that I'm, I'm going to run through them myself. A blank server that means with no additional software installed other than will go into 2004 LTS. Ideally, you want four gigabytes of RAM more if you want to play around with with running multiple instances, eight gig is probably more comfortable. It's not so it won't be sufficient to just run this on your laptop. Right, you need to have a public IP address. The reason for that is twofold. Firstly, that's, you're going to be able to set up SSL certificates on your on your server. Now to set up SSL or TLS, you need to, you need to have a public IP address and you also need to have a domain name mapped to it. And so that's a little bit of infrastructure setup that you're going to need to do. The other reason for putting it online is that it also gives us an opportunity to be able to check what you've done. So once you have your server up and running, it's possible for me or others to go in and have a look at it. How do you get yourself online? Well, it depends. I mean, some of you may be working in environments already where you're able to to put yourself up a virtual machine. The easiest way is probably to go is to use a cloud provider of some sort. And many of them probably most of them now because they're all competing with one another will provide you some free starter credit to get going. So I know, for example, Linnode, if you sign up for account on Linnode, they'll give you $100 free startup credit. And to run a four gigabyte RAM server on Linnode will cost you $20 a month. So that would that would basically get you going. I know Google also offers free credit. I think I think digital ocean others. Stephen is the expert on the cheapest possible service. I'm not sure if I'm on table. I know is a favorite of Stephen Kaya SSD nodes. I think it's even cheaper. My personal favorites and one I always recommend I guess is Linnode. Partly because I think it's, it's very reasonable cost per performance. Also, we have a good, we have good contacts. We have an executive fellow by the name of Fred Weston, who has an interest in the in the project and generally is available to help people out when they get stuck. So, yeah, I would suggest if you haven't got yourself a cloud provider of choice. And have a go at the getting started, make yourself an account on Linnode, and you can get yourself a free Linnode for a couple of months to work with. That's also the environment which I'm going to be working with with the demo. Having said that, pretty much any other any other cloud provider would do. It is theoretically possible to, to run it offline. But there's quite a few changes I would need to make to the setup scripts to make that work. Partly because we've tried to create a set of installation scripts which, which are kind of secure by default so to make it easy for people to set up. HTTPS on their server and to make it difficult not to. It was a deliberate design decision before it was, before it was quite difficult to, to, to set up the HTTPS and there were a lot of servers out there who were just running on encrypted on the web. Fortunately, nowadays I think it's far fewer, pretty much most of the servers I come across people have got them configured securely or reasonably securely. There's still a few that you can find but you're not running HTTPS. So there is a channel in the slack. I mean, I'm going to have a look at some of the slack channels in a minute. There is a channel in the slack which we have dedicated to, to questions and information and what have you around server setup. So I'm going to suggest that if people struggle with that, that they raise issues in that channel and so we can all work through it together. Don't panic in the sense that if you don't have your virtual server up and running now, you still have two weeks to complete your assignment. So obviously the sooner you get it up and running the better, but if it takes a couple of days to sort things out, then you still should be able to complete. The DNS record is, is something again, we're kind of hoping the most participants on here are have some Linux networking experience. I hope you know how to create yourself a DNS record. You need to have access to some domain in order to be able to do that. Again, if there are questions and difficulties around that, I think we should talk about them on the on the slack channel. Which comes the next point on here. The other thing you need beside your virtual server is your account on slack. I think Alice or Martin should already have set everybody up. I think that was part of the registration process. And what we're going to try to do is to keep all of the discussion and links to material and things like that on the slack. For that reason, I think Martin has even disabled the zoom chat. When we do chat, we try to keep all the discussion on slack that makes it easier to to look back on to have extended discussions, which last longer than a zoom session, things like that. The other thing that you need will need is some kind of SSH client on your computer. Preferably open SSH. I know a lot of Windows users are fond of something like putty for SSH. Set up with putty. There's certain things with putty which is a little bit tricky to do. I think if you can run open SSH on your on your computer as a client, it'll be a little bit easier to follow what I'm doing because I'm also going to be using open SSH. There are various ways on Windows to do that. You can either probably the easiest thing is to run a Linux virtual machine on Windows and use that as your as your client. You also need to have a pair of SSH keys or public key and a private key so that you can set up access to your server using keys. Let me just break from the slides a little bit and look at slack. This is the slack environment that's been set up for us. And slack has a number of channels and we see we created one here called cloud service. Let's ask if people have particular questions queries problems if they get stuck or suggestions or what have you related to the whole business of getting their server up and running. Put all those questions and discussion in here in this particular channel. I'm told just because of the way that this slack thing works, that people don't necessarily see aren't automatically joined to these channels that they will have to actually browse and join join the channels. So how to join a channel. I think. Let's just see as Alice on this. Bob map shoot something in. Yeah, please do. Yes, above the channels to see there's something called more channels. The three dots above the channel is on the left side. Oh yeah. If you click on that more channels. Yeah, you should be able to see the list of the whole channels. Okay, I think I'm seeing the list of all channels already. I'm seeing the channel browser. Yes. Each of the course can also navigate here and manually join any channel that you missed so far. That's all thank you. Yeah. Okay, thanks Martin. Hopefully everybody got that so when you go to that if you go to the captain you don't see all these same channels that I'm seeing. We're there to the three dots on more than you can find the different channels. So we have this one which we should find, particularly if you're having issues with your cloud server. Then for each of the presentations or sessions. We've decided to make a separate channel for each one so this morning, besides this little overview will be talking a bit about overall architecture. And so questions about this morning's presentation, ongoing discussion, etc. Link to the slides put into this particular channel afterwards this morning we're going to be talking about LXD so we made a separate channel for that. And then afterwards this morning we're going to talk about the installation. So this is the, this is the pattern we're going to try to follow. See how well it works. We know by the end of the day if it's a disaster or not we may have to change our approach. You can see quite a lot of people are sending have sent me direct messages already. Please bear in mind that there's quite a lot of people and probably not going to be able to answer all of my direct messages. So, yeah, as much as possible, make use of the channels for discussion. So I think the introduce yourself channel a lot of people have already discovered and have started introducing themselves. That's great. I know quite a lot of you already quite a lot of you I don't. I'm going to read through the introduce yourself channel this afternoon get a better idea.