My Linux Upskill Challenge Journey: Day 0

This content was originally published as part of my Digital Garden that you can find here:

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

• URL: https://linuxupskillchallenge.org/00/

• I created an EC2 instance in an AWS account] I already had with this specs:

• 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.