Book Image

Linux Administration Best Practices

By : Scott Alan Miller
3.3 (3)
Book Image

Linux Administration Best Practices

3.3 (3)
By: Scott Alan Miller

Overview of this book

Linux is a well-known, open source Unix-family operating system that is the most widely used OS today. Linux looks set for a bright future for decades to come, but system administration is rarely studied beyond learning rote tasks or following vendor guidelines. To truly excel at Linux administration, you need to understand how these systems work and learn to make strategic decisions regarding them. Linux Administration Best Practices helps you to explore best practices for efficiently administering Linux systems and servers. This Linux book covers a wide variety of topics from installation and deployment through to managing permissions, with each topic beginning with an overview of the key concepts followed by practical examples of best practices and solutions. You'll find out how to approach system administration, Linux, and IT in general, put technology into proper business context, and rethink your approach to technical decision making. Finally, the book concludes by helping you to understand best practices for troubleshooting Linux systems and servers that'll enable you to grow in your career as well as in any aspect of IT and business. By the end of this Linux administration book, you'll have gained the knowledge needed to take your Linux administration skills to the next level.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Understanding the Role of Linux System Administrator
4
Section 2: Best Practices for Linux Technologies
9
Section 3: Approaches to Effective System Administration

Choosing your distribution

Surprisingly, picking which distribution, or distro as it is commonly called in the Linux world, can be far more of a challenge than it seems like it should be. You might be lucky and work for a company that has a pre-determined Linux distro standard that you have to follow, and this question is already answered for you. This is becoming an increasingly rare scenario, though, as companies begin to realize the benefits of using the right distro for the right use case, and as it becomes better known that the idea that skills standardization just doesn't benefit from keeping systems identical as much as it was commonly assumed. But the practice still exists.

At the end of the day, it is essentially nonsensical to lead with operating system over workload choices. There is relatively little value in forcing a specific operating system choice and making application choices based on that. Of course, in an ideal world, all factors are considered and weighed...