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

Binary, source, and script software deployments

Software can come in all shapes and sizes. So, software deployments are not a one size fits all affair. The standard means of deploying software are directly as a binary package, through source code that needs to be compiled into a binary package, or as a script. We will dig into each of these as it is necessary to understand what each is and when they might be appropriate.

Compiled and interpreted software

Many system administrators have never worked as developers and often are not aware of how software exists. There are two fundamental types of programming languages: compiled and interpreted.

Compiled languages are written in one language (source code) and run through a compiler to produce binary executable code that can run directly on an operating system. This can be an oversimplification, but we are not developers and need only be concerned with the original code being compiled into a binary format. For Linux, this format...