Today, I ripped it up and started again, doing so in a particular order to make sure that I got almost everything right, first time, every time, nearly. So I backed up WordPress using All-in-One WP Migration and pressed the button on OHV server control panel to reset back to vanilla Ubuntu server 18.04.
After powering back up, it comes with root account that you’re emailed the password for and an ubuntu user that I don’t know the password for, which is weird.
I deleted ubuntu and recreated with a nice 20 character password, and logged in as such. But I’m used to being logged in automatically through SSH, as user ubuntu, since that’s how Amazon Web Services comes preconfigured. This involves public and private key pairs and the public key being submitted automatically on connection. I found these steps on good ol’ Digital Ocean which I had to amend since it is written assuming your SSH app is SSH for Linux commandline and not PuTTY for Windows. That being the case, I swapped step 1 for the PuTTYgen method, copied the public key created, then pasted in to file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys (being logged in as ubuntu, it saved to /home/ubuntu/.ssh/authorized_keys ). I saved PuTTYgen’s private key to my Windows Home Directory My Documents and connected with it in PuTTY. Bang, I’m in!
I continued the steps recommended on Digital Ocean so password authentication is disabled, only SSH key pairs work. I have a key for root, and a key for ubuntu. The purpose of the exercise was to use an account that requires sudo for any system-altering commands (which most are when installing various platforms).
More later, I’m going out to buy some green hair dye.