Objectives

Working in groups, you will build a Linux-based virtualization host server on hardware provided in the class.

• Install Ubuntu Linux Server
• Configure LVM (Logical Volume Manager) during installation. We will provide enough space for our root filesystem and leave the rest available for use to create additional logical volumes.
• We will install Ubuntu Server 26.04 (Resolute) - recommended, support until April 2031

Overview

Most of all the details that you need to do this install are provided in our Virtual Training Platform documentation at:

https://images.nsrc.org/docs/os-installation/

We will provide a USB drive you can boot your machine from and includes the Ubuntu server installation software.

Summary of Base Ubuntu OS Installation Steps

Here is a quick summary of answers to provide during installation. More details are provided in the documentation linked above.

• USB NIC connected to your WAN (typical name like enx00e04c063260)
• Onboard NIC used for your LAN (typical name like enp86s0, or eno1)
• When asked, create regular user “nsrc” (be sure to remember the password you choose)
• When asked to partition, edit the ubuntu-lv root filesystem option and set it to be 200GiB in size. Leave everything else as-is.
• Swap space set up is fine
• Don’t install any of the snapd packages listed, just press Continue
• Do install OpenSSH Server when prompted.

When prompted, you can remove the USB drive and let your machine restart.

Post Base Ubuntu OS Install Steps

Once your machine restarts, you can log in as the user “nsrc” using the password you used during installation. Now you are ready to configure your new Ubuntu 26.04 LTS server to work with the Virtual Training Platform and the various lab topologies that are available.

Configure Network Connection

Now that you are logged in to your new Ubuntu server you should read the online documentation to configure your network interfaces for your environment. This is available at:

https://images.nsrc.org/docs/os-installation/#network-configuration

Then, continue with the next step, which is Scripted Setup

Note

Until now you will have been typing commands at the system console.

Once the scripted setup is complete, you should be able to connect a laptop ethernet connection into the LAN interface, and ssh to nsrc@local.nsrc.org or nsrc@100.126.0.1, with password authentication.

You can also SSH to the WAN interface address, but this is restricted to public key authentication only. This means you’ll need to upload your public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys if you want to access this way.

6 Aug 2026