Setup of Debian Virtual Machines

Dec 27, 2016
linux vm debian
5 min read

Installation Steps

Pick the type of Debian distribution you want. I usually go for Testing to keep up with the latest fixes - it is a rolling release. Download a Testing netinst image for amd64 (for 64bit VMs) from https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/.

Create a VM and add a network card. 1GB of RAM and 128GB of disk are OK. Adjust CPUs to taste.
Do a graphical install.
If you are installing a machine with more than one network interface, you will be asked to pick the primary one. Pick the first, as this should be the NAT one.
Hostname can be something simple, such as “deb2”.
Domain name can be “debnet”.
DO NOT set a root password. By omitting it you force Debian to install sudo. By default sudo is not installed and is a pain to add later, this trick makes for an easier life.
New user: “Philip Daniels” for the full name, pick one word for the UID.
Partition: Guided, use entire disk. All files in one partition.
Configuring Package Manager proxy: this can be left blank at home. At work, the corporate proxy should authenticate you, but if it doesn’t the precise magic to enter is in my password vault. See Network Setup in Hyper-V and Virtual Box
Software selection: typically I just go for “SSH Server” and “standard system utilities”. It helps to keep the size down and everything else can be installed later with apt-get anyway.
Install Grub, pick /dev/sda.
Done.

Post-Installation Setup

Assign a Static IP

If at home, reserve a static IP on the router. At work, or to do it manually, edit /etc/network/interfaces. See man interfaces for more info or browse the Debian Network Configuration Guide.

Something like this is typically seen for a machine with a DHCP configured interface:

# The primary network interface
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

The equivalent for a static IP is:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
    address 192.0.2.7
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    gateway 192.0.2.254         # Get this from route -n

At work, if using the standard Virtual Box setup described in Network Setup in Hyper-V and Virtual Box, then the stanza for the second NIC will look something like:

auto enp0s8
iface enp0s8 inet static
    address 192.168.56.101
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    network 192.168.56.0
    broadcast 192.168.56.255

Edit /etc/hosts

See here.

Manual DNS Setup

If you have at least one interface setup by DHCP then DNS servers should be discovered automatically. If you do not, or you want to override them, they are specified in /etc/resolv.conf. Typically it looks like this:

nameserver 192.168.0.1

You can add as many lines as you want. Google has publicly available nameservers at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.8.4.

Install my ssh key and setup forwarding

See my post on SSH.

Setup dotfiles

mkdir -p ~/repos && cd ~/repos
sudo apt-get install git
git clone git@github.com:PhilipDaniels/dotfiles
cd dotfiles
./00install_dotfiles.sh
./10install_linux_cli.sh

Getting files into and out of Debian VMs

Using FileZilla

For one-off file transfers, this is the easiest way. Basically, just setup SSH on Windows and connect using FileZilla. Drag and drop files. See SSH Setup for precise details.

This guide is the best I have seen. Covers accessing a Windows share from Linux, and creating a share in Linux which can be accessed from Windows.

One thing to bear in mind when accessing a Windows share - you need to pick and/or create a Windows user. Options:

Your day-to-day user. Pros: It will probably have the right permissions. Cons: The user must have a password for this to work, not all Windows users do. Also, if the password has to change then you will lose your mounts whenever the pwd changes.
A new user, such as “unix”. Cons: Even making it an Administrator won’t give it full control over everything. For example, it will not be able to see into your day-to-day user’s home folder.

The following commands may be useful for debugging purposes:

# Browse shares, n.b. there is no "Phil" account on hyperbox.
smbclient -L hyperbox -W workgroup -U hyperbox\\userid

sudo mount -t cifs //hyperbox/d ./hd -o username=userid,password=pwd,domain=hyperbox

# Puts you in a shell, you can do “ls”, “cd” etc. Good for checking.
smbclient \\\\hyperbox\\d -U hyperbox\\userid pwd

Permanent Mounting with /etc/fstab

Create a directory(s) to serve as the mount point:

cd /mnt
sudo mkdir c r s t

Add the following lines to /etc/fstab (where hyperbox is the Windows server):

# You may use spaces to separate fields. See "man fstab" for details of what each field is, and
# "man mount" and "man mount.cifs" for details of the options, but auto means can be mounted with
# "mount -a", not that it is mounted automatically at boot time (they *all* are if they are in
# this file). The "comment=" is necessary to get the mounts to work at boot time (this is known to
# work on Debian Stretch as of July 2016).
//hyperbox/c$ /mnt/c cifs credentials=/home/phil/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,rw,noperm,nounix,auto,comment=systemd.automount
//hyperbox/r$ /mnt/r cifs credentials=/home/phil/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,rw,noperm,nounix,auto,comment=systemd.automount
//hyperbox/s$ /mnt/s cifs credentials=/home/phil/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,rw,noperm,nounix,auto,comment=systemd.automount
//hyperbox/t$ /mnt/t cifs credentials=/home/phil/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,rw,noperm,nounix,auto,comment=systemd.automount

Create a file /home/phil/.smbcredentials (actually it can be anywhere) to hold your user id and password. Add the following lines (note no spaces):

domain=hyperbox
username=user
password=password

And secure it:

chmod 600 /home/phil/.smbcredentials

Then refresh mount points:

sudo mount -a

If you make a mistake, to unmount something do:

sudo umount /mnt/c

More info at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MountWindowsSharesPermanently and https://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/WindowsShares (which also includes a discussion of auto-mounting shares as and when needed).

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