Book Image

Mastering Ubuntu Server - Second Edition

By : Jay LaCroix
Book Image

Mastering Ubuntu Server - Second Edition

By: Jay LaCroix

Overview of this book

Ubuntu Server has taken the data centers by storm. Whether you're deploying Ubuntu for a large-scale project or for a small office, it is a stable, customizable, and powerful Linux distribution that leads the way with innovative and cutting-edge features. For both simple and complex server deployments, Ubuntu's flexible nature can be easily adapted to meet to the needs of your organization. With this book as your guide, you will learn all about Ubuntu Server, from initial deployment to creating production-ready resources for your network. The book begins with the concept of user management, group management, and filesystem permissions. Continuing into managing storage volumes, you will learn how to format storage devices, utilize logical volume management, and monitor disk usage. Later, you will learn how to virtualize hosts and applications, which will cover setting up KVM/QEMU, as well as containerization with both Docker and LXD. As the book continues, you will learn how to automate configuration with Ansible, as well as take a look at writing scripts. Lastly, you will explore best practices and troubleshooting techniques when working with Ubuntu Server that are applicable to real-world scenarios. By the end of the book, you will be an expert Ubuntu Server administrator who is well-versed in its advanced concepts.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)

Understanding when to use root

In the last chapter, we set up our very own Ubuntu Server installation. During the installation process, we were instructed to create a user account as an administrator of the system. So, at this point, we should have two users on our server. We have the aforementioned administrative user, as well as root. We can certainly create additional user accounts with varying levels of access (and we will do so in this chapter), but before we get to that, some discussion is in order regarding the administrator account you created, as well as the root user that was created for you.

In regard to root, the root user account exists on all Linux distributions and is the most powerful user account on the planet. The root user account can be used to do anything, and I do mean anything. Want to use root to create files and directories virtually anywhere on the filesystem...