Book Image

Mastering Linux Administration

By : Alexandru Calcatinge, Julian Balog
Book Image

Mastering Linux Administration

By: Alexandru Calcatinge, Julian Balog

Overview of this book

Linux plays a significant role in modern data center management and provides great versatility in deploying and managing your workloads on-premises and in the cloud. This book covers the important topics you need to know about for your everyday Linux administration tasks. The book starts by helping you understand the Linux command line and how to work with files, packages, and filesystems. You'll then begin administering network services and hardening security, and learn about cloud computing, containers, and orchestration. Once you've learned how to work with the command line, you'll explore the essential Linux commands for managing users, processes, and daemons and discover how to secure your Linux environment using application security frameworks and firewall managers. As you advance through the chapters, you'll work with containers, hypervisors, virtual machines, Ansible, and Kubernetes. You'll also learn how to deploy Linux to the cloud using AWS and Azure. By the end of this Linux book, you'll be well-versed with Linux and have mastered everyday administrative tasks using workflows spanning from on-premises to the cloud. If you also find yourself adopting DevOps practices in the process, we'll consider our mission accomplished.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Linux Basic Administration
7
Section 2: Advanced Linux Server Administration
13
Section 3: Cloud Administration

Installing Ansible

In this section, we'll show you how to install Ansible on a control node. On Linux, we can install Ansible in a couple of ways:

  • Using the platform-specific package manager (for example, apt on Ubuntu/Debian and yum on RHEL/CentOS)
  • Using pip, the Python package manager

The Ansible community recommends pip for installing Ansible since it provides the most recent stable version of Ansible. In this section, we'll use both methods on Ubuntu and RHEL/CentOS. For a complete Ansible installation guide for all major OS platforms, please follow the online documentation at https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/installation_guide/intro_installation.html.

On the control node, Ansible requires Python, so before installing Ansible, we need to make sure we have Python installed on our system.

Important note

Python 2 is no longer supported as of January 1, 2020. Please use Python 3 instead.

Let's start by installing Ansible on Ubuntu...