Debian Basic Post Install

After installing Debian, these steps are recommended.

Make User Admin with sudo

Install useful management packages:

apt install net-tools sudo

Then add the initial user to the sudo group:

adduser [username] sudo

Disable root User Login

Now that you have an administrative sudo user, you can disable the root user login altogether.

Edit /etc/passwd and change the root line as shown below:

root:x:0:0:root:/root:/usr/sbin/nologin

After that, lock the root user:

passwd -l root

A user with a locked password can’t login: passwd -l puts a ! character in front of the password hash stored in /etc/shadow.