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

Introducing processes

A process represents the running instance of a program. In general, a program is a combination of instructions and data, compiled as an executable unit. When a program runs, a process is created. In other words, a process is simply a program in action. Processes execute specific tasks, and sometimes, they are also referred to as jobs (or tasks).

There are many ways to create or start a process. In Linux, every command starts a process. A command could be a user-initiated task in a Terminal session, a script, or a program (executable) that's invoked manually or automatically.

Usually, the way a process is created and interacts with the system (or user) determines its process type. Let's have a closer look at the different types of processes in Linux.

Understanding process types

At a high level, there are two major types of processes in Linux:

  • Foreground (interactive)
  • Background (non-interactive or automated)

Interactive...