VPS Bootstrap as Root via Chef

WARNING: No warranty expressed or implied about the security of your machine after executing these scripts

A chef repo to be run as root against a fresh Ubuntu 12.04 VPS install using knife solo. It provides the following features:

• enable password-less sudo
• create a regular user
• setup ssh keys
• harden ssh

After this is done you can use password-less ssh with your regular user account.

Setup

• install knife solo (use gem install knife-solo)
• prepare the target machine using knife solo prepare -P password root@your.host
• overwrite the contents of the newly created file in nodes/your.host.json with the contents of template.json
• create identity files using ssh-keygen -t rsa (or use existing)
• copy the id-rsa.pub file to cookbooks/setup/files/default/authorized_keys
• update attributes however you'd like (I'd just edit cookbooks/setup/attributes/default.rb)
• run knife solo cook root@your.host and enter the root password repeatedly

At the end of the install it restarts ssh with root login disabled, so start using your newly created user account. Remember that the ssh port has been changed and that the identity file is required. You can ssh using a command like the following:

ssh -p port -I /path/to/identity/id_rsa newuser@your.host

Or you can setup an ssh config in ~/.ssh/config that looks like this:

Host your.host
    HostName your.host
    Port ssh.port
    User newuser
    IdentityFile /path/to/identity/id_rsa

Now you can use Chef as a regular user to set everything else up.