Vultr Cloud VPS Setup

VPS

I’ve become a big fan of Apple products and now use MacOS/iOS OS with ARM64 architecture on all my devices. However, I’m also a CTF player, and I mainly focus on pwn and secondly on reverse. This requires me to run programs built with AMD64 (x86_64) architecture most of the time. So, I either need to buy a laptop that I’ll only use for CTF (which has a low CPU value) or rent a VPS with x86_64 architecture. After looking at all the VPS providers on Reddit, I found that most people recommend Vultr. Their data centre is located in Tokyo and Singapore, which are close to Taiwan with low latency.

Vultr

After register to https://www.vultr.com, you may view the following pages:

It’s time to go shopping! Similarly, after looking at all the options and the feedback from the network, I decided to go with Cloud Compute – Shared CPU, picking Tokyo as the location and using Ubuntu 22.04. I’ve gone for the High Frequency VPS Plan, which lots of users recommend, and the lowest price spec (32 GB NVMe).

Just a heads-up: I’m only using it for CTF, so I’ve turned off the auto backups feature, which costs an extra 2.40 USD.

Once you click ‘deploy now’, you’ll need to enter your payment details. Once you’ve done that, you can deploy the machine pretty quickly and view all the details with a good GUI interface.

Connect to VPS

In the admin pages, we are able to view ip address, username and password of the machine. Connect it to the machine by using ssh

$ ssh <username>@<ip_address>
# prompt password

Then you’re free to use the machine as you see fit. However, I am a lazy person which lazy to type the password every login. Thus, I decided to login by using ssh keys. In order to do that, we first generate ssh key pair in our machine

$ ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C <email> -f <key_name>

Then, we transfer the public key <key_name>.pub to the vps by using the following command

$ ssh-copy-id -i <ssh_public_key_path> <username>@<ip_address_of_vps>

In addition, we also can put the public key in vultr admin pages https://my.vultr.com/settings/#settingssshkeys

Next Step?

Once set up the machine as described above, we are all set to start up the CTF games! But what to do? See the next post :)