Trying to improve security on an AWS build of 11.10 and avoid the frequently discussed torrent of brute-force against default users and default ports eg root on port 22 -

Moving to a non-standard SSH port by editing /etc/ssh/sshd_config is straight forward enough.

Ubuntu doesn't permit root login and UEC's don't give desktop recovery mode as a by-pass, so that covers that. At least I believe it does.

Creating a new admin user and removing the default one of 'ubuntu' seems to be a different story. This just doesn't seem to be do-able. There seems to be a sneaky 'belt & braces' method used here which I can't fathom out. The only reference that I can find is in /etc/sudoers.d in the config 90-cloudimg-ubuntu.

With the default user 'ubuntu' everything works without a snag. However, I feel almost as if I'm trying to touch things that I shouldn't because I just can't get my new admin user to https logon (with webmin) or to ssh.

Also, I don't know if these are connected issues or not (??) but I can't get Webmin/Virtualmin to use a non-standard port either. It is documented that you don't have to stick with :10000 (don't know how many people use Webmin).

http://www.virtualmin.com/node/6148

The upshot of this is that I find myself stuck with minded people having a head start on brute-forcing my https logon because the user 'ubuntu' seems almost hard-wired into the distro and is probably the next most popular user name to 'root'.

There don't seem to be any solutions to this anywhere. Does this mean it's completely obvious but I just can't see it or is it something else?