Operating Systems

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>> So when it comes to operating systems, there's essentially kind of just two basic kind, if you've got Windows-based systems and you have your Unix-based systems. The interesting thing is Windows, it really just goes to Windows Server when you talk about server operating systems not a whole lot there.

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The consumer operating system, there's on windows eleven, now, is it twelve? It's on windows eleven. You could probably run a server there, but I wouldn't recommend it. Windows Server is optimized for that. When it comes to Unix, there is every flavor you can possibly imagine. I have some of these listed here.

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So you have Solaris, you have Linux, you have BSD. These are kind of the three main subsets of the Unix Operating System. Now, Linux is the one you're probably most familiar with. Linux you've all heard of there's this and that's one where there's the most versions of the operating system of Linux.

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Linux is a much more user friendly, much more accessible version of Unix with a lot more built in commands. And when it comes to Linux, there's Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat, Alpine, Arch. I just named a few. And there's a flavor of Linux for whatever you wanna do, because it's highly customizable.

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We're gonna use Ubuntu, which is by far the most common and most popular operating system. It's owned by a company called Ubiqiuiti, and I think Red Hat may have bought them a few years back. I'm a little not up to date on my Linux comings and goings. But Ubuntu's a safe bet, you can't go wrong going with Ubuntu.

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I've used in every version of course, all those operating system or all those websites are still running there's no problem with Ubuntu. When it comes to the other operating systems, BSD is probably one you've not heard of. But BSD creates freeBSD, which is based off BSD. And freeBSD is of course MacOS, the operating system that we're using right now.

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Again, but why do all these tools work together? Because the root is Unix. So the commands we're using here on our terminal, in the command that we did a little bit earlier, will also work on Ubuntu because the core is still Unix. So that's the important thing. So, you pick Unix and pick Ubuntu when you're choosing the operating system.

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And I forgot to mention the best thing about Linux is most of them are open source and they're all free. Well, most of them are free, Red Hat is not free. But that's fantastic, what an amazing accomplishment we've made all these versions and flavors operating systems and most of them are open source and free.

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There's nothing else in life that gives you things for free. Just doesn't happen anywhere else other than software engineering, what a great field we work in So before we keep going with the VPS, I do wanna talk a little bit about operating systems because we're all running them.

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My phone's running one, your car is running one, your watch, if it's a smart watch, is running one. Everything's running on some sort of operating system. And operating systems, at least in the Unix terms, is made up of three distinct parts. The programs or utilities that's kind of what we were using earlier.

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When we say makedir, rmdir, vi these are all programs and utilities built into the operating system. There's the Kernel, which is the main part of the operation system, that's the one that talks to the hardware. That's what gets really really tricky. When I said we're going deep, we're not going kernel deep.

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We're staying at the shell in the user land. But it is possible to go into the kernel we get the hardware programming, which is its own field of computer engineering. And that's more computer engineering than software engineering, different fields entirely. But I think the most interesting thing about Unix and why it's such a powerful operating system is everything is either a file or a process that's it.

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It's a really simple model of operating. So, it's a file that you interact with or it's a process something that's running that's it. All these utilities, they're just files and they follow the POSIX standard. They have standard in standard out standard error. And it's amazing that all these things come together.

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All these disparate tools come together to form the operating system that we can use interchangeably no matter where we are on Phone, MacOS or on Ubuntu or on Fedora. They all work the same across all these tool sets. I don't know, it's astounding that we've come this far.

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Before we jump to security, let's jump back and see how far we got. So we chose Ubuntu, we chose the LTS version of Ubuntu. On droplet size, choose the smallest one. We're not pushing the bounds here. We're not creating Netflix 2.O just yet. And choose the one that's the cheapest.

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I'd say, again we don't need a lot of compute power for this. The $4 droplet is not available on SFO isn't available in New York, should be. Let's double check. Yes, so if you want the absolute cheapest one choose the New York data center. Again for this exercise, focus on the costs, the compute power, we're not really gonna push it too hard.

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But I'm gonna stick with San Francisco because Loyal to the West Coast and it's gonna run about $6 a month in compute time. But again, if you use that link, you get free credits. So it shouldn't cost you anything, unless you forget about it. So don't forget about it.

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So how do we get into the server? We can make one pretty easily. We got the operating system, we got the data center, but how do we actually connect into it? Well, we can use a password but it's actually this like well why we won't use a password.

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We're gonna use an SSH key. And this is where things get a little more complex but they get a lot more interesting too.