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

Rebooting servers

Ask your average system administrator, or even a non-technical but interested third party, and they will tell you the importance of long uptimes on servers and how they want to see those ultra-high time since reboots on them. It feels natural, and nearly everyone brags about it. My servers have not needed a reboot in three years!

There are two key problems with this, however.

The first problem is that time since reboot carries no business value, and business value determines IT value. So why should we care, let alone brag, about something that has no value? It might be interesting to know how long a system has managed to stay online, but an investor is not going to reap a reward from the fact that a computer system has gone an extended period of time without a reboot. We work for the good of the business, if we start to care about something other than resultant business value, we have lost our way. This happens when we focus on means instead of ends, server...