For those of you who don’t know, I work at a Microsoft shop. It’s not as bad as it initially sounds. Microsoft has changed a lot since the days when I was sure that they killed my pappy. By the way, my favorite line from Scott Hanselman’s post is how he describes Microsoft: “We’re not nearly as organized as we’d need to be to be as evil as you might think we are.” I’ll just leave it at that.

One of the perks of working at a Microsoft shop is my MSDN account, and one of the perks of having an MSDN account is the free Azure benefits that I get. What have I decided to do with my 100 Azure fun-bucks per month, you ask? Of course, I’m going to set up an Ubuntu server! For the curious, 100 quatloos a month on Azure can get you a D1 Linux VM (1 core, 3.5 GB RAM, 50 GB SSD), some hard drive space, and leave enough left over to play around with some of the other neet things that seem to be showing up on Azure (HDInsight / Machine Learning, I’m looking at you).

Microsoft’s “Create a Virtual Machine Running Linux” is suprizingly helpful, considering my usual subpar experience with Microsoft documentation. If you’re interested in doing things right, you should probably also check out “Introduction to Linux on Azure” I ended up just provisioning the VM with a password, and later I generated some SSH keys like so:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096
ssh-copy-id -i id_rsa.pub <user>@<DNS name>

If you end up going my route, don’t forget to disable password login to the machine when you’re all done. You can do that by editing your sshd_config file.

sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

changing the line:

PasswordAuthentication yes

to read:

PasswordAuthentication no

Finally, you’ll want to restart the VM so that your changes will take effect.