Day 0 of a Linux Challenge and the Prompt I Almost Got Wrong

I signed up for the Black IT Academy Linux Upskill Challenge. Twenty lessons, one server, a cohort in Slack, and a rule that you keep a public journal of what you did every day. Day 0 was today. The only goal was to have a server I could log into and to post a screenshot proving it. That took about ten minutes. Then a purple box showed up in my terminal and I sat there for a while. The setup I went with a DigitalOcean droplet. Ubuntu 24.04, the cheapest Basic plan, [password / SSH key] for auth. The challenge guide says do not spend Day 0 comparing hosting providers, and after my AWS bill situation I did not need convincing. First thing I did after the droplet came up was set a $10 billing alert. That is a habit now. Connected with ssh root@ and the IP. Said yes to the fingerprint prompt. Ran whoami and uptime and felt good about myself. Then I ran the standard sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y because that is what you do on a fresh box. The prompt Halfway through the upgrade everything stopped and I got this: A new version of configuration file /etc/ssh/sshd_config is available, but the version installed currently has been locally modified. What do you want to do about modified configuration file sshd_config? With a menu. Install the package maintainer's version. Keep the local version currently installed. Show the differences. A three way merge option. My first reaction was confusion. Locally modified by who? I had owned this server for four minutes. I had not opened a single config file. What was actually going on sshd_config is the file that controls how the SSH server behaves. Which port it listens on, whether root can log in, whether passwords are allowed or only keys. It is the file that decides if you can get back into your own server. The reason it was "locally modified" is that DigitalOcean modified it. When a droplet gets built, their provisioning process writes SSH settings into that file so you can log in the way you chose in their dashboard. From