You don't have to manually install security updates on all your boxes. Debian has some recommended solutions here
You can configure automated security updates like this:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install unattended-upgrades -y
sudo dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades
The frequency of unattended-upgrades is controlled by the settings in this file:
/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades
This quick project is great for eg. a spare laptop or a VM!
I would recommend installing this on a dedicated Debian server instance. No need for a desktop environment. I would also recommend using LVM + LUKS encryption.
That said this will work on any Debian or Ubuntu-based system.
If you're using Debian, Linux Mint/LMDE, or Ubuntu with full-disk LUKS encryption and backing up with Timeshift, this guide is for that day your system breaks, your drive dies, or your laptop disappears. Here's how to bring everything back, with encryption, system settings, and sanity intact.
Please note: This is the manual recovery procedure I followed when restoring a Timeshift snapshot to a freshly formatted LUKS/LVM installation failed, resulting in an unbootable system.
Before proceeding, back up any important personal data that Timeshift snapshots do not include by default — such as documents, photos, or files in your /home
If you’ve already done that — or if you can’t — read on.
So, i wrote a blog post about automatically creating and storing YunoHost backups, on a remote VPS. Read it here
My friend needed a similar solution, but needed to sync the backup files to an S3 bucket.
For this solution we will modify this guide, provided by Contabo
This guide is actually awesome, and you should read it. We will be changing some things, since we are backing up from the YunoHost core, and not the entire filesystem.
Note: Since this post was written, a YunoHost app called >Yuno Archive has been added to the catalog. It provides many >of the same functions described in this guide, plus a >GUI, scheduling, multiple backup destinations, and >automatic pruning of old backups.
On the remote server, that will store the backup:
I started by creating an ECDSA key pair of 384 bits, with this command:
ssh-keygen -t ecdsa -b 384
Then i sent it to the YunoHost VPS with this command:
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/your-key-name.pub 'username'@'host-domain'
Then i created a cronjob that will sync two directories, over SSH, using rsync.
comm -23 <(apt-mark showmanual | sort -u) <(gzip -dc /var/log/installer/initial-status.gz | sed -n 's/^Package: //p' | sort -u)
I made a script automating the last blog post!
Get it here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tr00ls/tr00ls/main/zsh-script.sh
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tr00ls/tr00ls/main/zsh-script.sh && sudo chmod +x zsh-script.sh
sudo ./zsh-script.sh
Let's use zsh to make our terminal look pretty.
To install zsh, open your terminal and enter:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install zsh -y
To make zsh your default shell enter:
sudo chsh -s /usr/bin/zsh
We need git for these next steps, so install it if you don't already have it:
Hello World!