To log into your server, you will need to know your server’s public IP address. You will also need the password or — if you installed an SSH key for authentication — the private key for the root user’s account.
If you are not already connected to your server, log in now as the root user using the following command (substitute the highlighted portion of the command with your server’s public IP address):
ssh root@your_server_ip
Accept the warning about host authenticity if it appears. If you are using password authentication, provide your root password to log in. If you are using an SSH key that is passphrase protected, you may be prompted to enter the passphrase the first time you use the key each session. If this is your first time logging into the server with a password, you may also be prompted to change the root password.
Creating a New User
Once you are logged in as root, you’ll be able to add the new user account. In the future, we’ll log in with this new account instead of root.
This example creates a new user called david, but you should replace that with a username that you like:
adduser david
Granting Administrative Privileges
Now we have a new user account with regular account privileges. However, we may sometimes need to do administrative tasks.
To avoid having to log out of our normal user and log back in as the root account, we can set up what is known as superuser or root privileges for our normal account. This will allow our normal user to run commands with administrative privileges by putting the word sudo before the command.
To add these privileges to our new user, we need to add the user to the sudo group. By default, on Ubuntu 20.04, users who are members of the sudo group are allowed to use the sudo command.
As root, run this command to add your new user to the sudo group (substitute the highlighted username with your new user):
usermod -aG sudo david
Setting Up a Basic Firewall
Ubuntu 20.04 servers can use the UFW firewall to make sure only connections to certain services are allowed. We can set up a basic firewall using this application.
Applications can register their profiles with UFW upon installation. These profiles allow UFW to manage these applications by name. OpenSSH, the service allowing us to connect to our server now, has a profile registered with UFW.
ufw app list
Output Available applications: OpenSSH
We need to make sure that the firewall allows SSH connections so that we can log back in next time. We can allow these connections by typing:
ufw allow OpenSSH
Afterwards, we can enable the firewall by typing:
ufw enable
Type y and press ENTER to proceed. You can see that SSH connections are still allowed by typing:
ufw status
Output Status: active To Action From -- ------ ---- OpenSSH ALLOW Anywhere OpenSSH (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6)
As the firewall is currently blocking all connections except for SSH, if you install and configure additional services, you will need to adjust the firewall settings to allow traffic in.
Enabling External Access for Your Regular User
Now that we have a regular user for daily use, we need to make sure we can SSH into the account directly.
The process for configuring SSH access for your new user depends on whether your server’s root account uses a password or SSH keys for authentication.
If the root Account Uses Password Authentication
If you logged in to your root account using a password, then password authentication is enabled for SSH. You can SSH to your new user account by opening up a new terminal session and using SSH with your new username:
ssh david@your_server_ip
After entering your regular user’s password, you will be logged in. Remember, if you need to run a command with administrative privileges, type sudo before it like this:
sudo command_to_run
You will be prompted for your regular user password when using sudo for the first time each session (and periodically afterwards).
To enhance your server’s security, we strongly recommend setting up SSH keys instead of using password authentication.
If the root Account Uses SSH Key Authentication
If you logged in to your root account using SSH keys, then password authentication is disabled for SSH. You will need to add a copy of your local public key to the new user’s ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file to log in successfully.
Since your public key is already in the root account’s ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file on the server, we can copy that file and directory structure to our new user account in our existing session.
The simplest way to copy the files with the correct ownership and permissions is with the rsync command. This will copy the root user’s .ssh directory, preserve the permissions, and modify the file owners, all in a single command. Make sure to change the highlighted portions of the command below to match your regular user’s name: