Steps 3–4 — First Login and Swap

Step 3 — First login

In your terminal, using your server’s IP:

ssh root@203.0.113.10

It asks whether you are sure — type yes. Your prompt changes to something like root@acme-agent-01.

You are on the server now. Everything you type goes to the machine in the data centre, not your laptop.

Install available updates:

apt update && apt upgrade -y

Step 4 — Add swap

Why it matters: when a machine runs completely out of memory, Linux does not slow down — it picks a running program and kills it. If that is your agent mid-thought, the failure looks bizarre and unrelated to memory.

Swap is a pressure-release valve that turns something died into something got slow for a second.

fallocate -l 4G /swapfile
chmod 600 /swapfile
mkswap /swapfile
swapon /swapfile
echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' >> /etc/fstab

Confirm with free -h — you should see a Swap row showing 4.0Gi.

That last line matters

echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' >> /etc/fstab is what makes swap survive a reboot. Without it, your swap silently disappears the first time the server restarts — and the problem comes back looking brand new.

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