Book Image

Linux Service Management Made Easy with systemd

4.5 (2)
Book Image

Linux Service Management Made Easy with systemd

4.5 (2)

Overview of this book

Linux Service Management Made Easy with systemd will provide you with an in-depth understanding of systemd, so that you can set up your servers securely and efficiently.This is a comprehensive guide for Linux administrators that will help you get the best of systemd, starting with an explanation of the fundamentals of systemd management.You’ll also learn how to edit and create your own systemd units, which will be particularly helpful if you need to create custom services or timers and add features or security to an existing service. Next, you'll find out how to analyze and fix boot-up challenges and set system parameters. An overview of cgroups that'll help you control system resource usage for both processes and users will also be covered, alongside a practical demonstration on how cgroups are structured, spotting the differences between cgroups Version 1 and 2, and how to set resource limits on both. Finally, you'll learn about the systemd way of performing time-keeping, networking, logging, and login management. You'll discover how to configure servers accurately and gather system information to analyze system security and performance. By the end of this Linux book, you’ll be able to efficiently manage all aspects of a server running the systemd init system.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1: Using systemd
12
Section 2: Understanding cgroups
16
Section 3: Logging, Timekeeping, Networking, and Booting

Understanding the pros and cons of rsyslog

Fedora was the first Linux distro to come with rsyslog as its default logging system, way back in 2007. It has quite a few improvements over the old syslog, and it eventually replaced syslog as the standard logging system on Linux, Unix, and Unix-like operating systems. Despite now having journald, rsyslog is still with us, as we'll see in just a bit.

One of the best features of rsyslog is also its biggest weakness. That is, it stores log files in plaintext format. That's great in a way because you can use your normal text search and viewing utilities to view the log files and find whatever information that you need to find. The less, head, tail, awk, and grep utilities are your friends when it comes to working with these plaintext log files. This also makes it very easy to write shell scripts to extract and parse information automatically.

But there are a few problems with using plaintext log files. The first one is that plaintext...