openSUSE and Rackspace Cloud Server : Handy Guide

openSUSE and Rackspace Cloud Server needs some extra steps to start using as a part of Public Cloud. openSUSE is rock solid but needs a bit elementary knowledge. The UNIX like which is used in rocket (actually specific space stations) definitely needs to know some rocket science! Almost all Cloud Hosting providers including Rackspace provides openSUSE image to build server.

Get Started With openSUSE and Rackspace Cloud Server with Next Generation Cloud

A person who is going to use openSUSE and Rackspace Cloud Server, probably need less screenshots, its handy to write with less screen shots ! Login to new Next Generation Cloud login panel and choose openSUSE as distro, at the time of writing we are using  openSUSE 12.1 :

Use at least 4 GB of RAM. This is from experience. You can scale down later. And try to avoid Windows OS with PuTTY, although we are showing with PuTTY to test in real time, it is better to use any Linux or Mac OS X for SSH/Telnet with openSUSE and Rackspace Cloud Server. If you have only windows, you can use bootable version of Ubuntu.

Steps After building of Server : openSUSE and Rackspace Cloud Server

With 4 GB of RAM, it will take a bit more time to build the server compared usually user server OS. Patiently wait until you are getting the message that it is running. openSUSE itself has very good resources on their wiki. We will show a normal day to day typical LAMP server setup. That means Apache, MySQL, PHP, BIND etc. can be installed. Keep in mind, openSUSE is typically used on the server end itself with GUI, but  we are using SSH/Telnet client. Note the message blackscreen details :

Our server’s name is thecustomizewindows. We need to add a home directory :

Do not copy-paste under Windows. SuSe needs keystrokes. Otherwise it will change – to dot. We need to login, so :

And :

Now you need to add SSH :

groupmod -A thecustomizewindows sudoer

And :

groupmod -A thecustomizewindows sshuser

Open the /etc/ssh/sshd_config with vi (there is no nano) :

You can see all are commented out. Go to editing mode and uncomment them, ListenAddress is Server’s IP. Lot of lines to make working :

Give it time. Save it.  SSH :

You need import it on your local computer :

scp -P22 ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub thecustomizewindows@198.61.166.132:/home/thecustomizewindows/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Change the red words with your own. The next steps are intense steps. Setting up the firewall :

And these configuration must be performed after reading the official guide. After this steps, you need to reboot from shell (do not use Rackspace Cloud account’s button unless needed), again login, this time it will work like other Linux distros but the commands are a bit distorted, we have made main configuration for SSH/Telnet work without GUI to install server side softwares. There is also resources in Rackspace’s knowledge base, plus the UNIX guru of Rackspace are on chat. openSUSE and Rackspace Cloud Server is really a bit special, if you can run as a web server proper, it is really solid on security.