Book Image

Mastering Ubuntu Server

By : Jay LaCroix
Book Image

Mastering Ubuntu Server

By: Jay LaCroix

Overview of this book

Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux operating system, and has various versions targeted at servers, desktops, phones, tablets and televisions. The Ubuntu Server Edition, also called Ubuntu Server, offers support for several common configurations, and also simplifies common Linux server deployment processes. With this book as their guide, readers will be able to configure and deploy Ubuntu Servers using Ubuntu Server 16.04, with all the skills necessary to manage real servers. The book begins with the concept of user management, group management, as well as file-system permissions. To manage your storage on Ubuntu Server systems, you will learn how to add and format storage and view disk usage. Later, you will also learn how to configure network interfaces, manage IP addresses, deploy Network Manager in order to connect to networks, and manage network interfaces. Furthermore, you will understand how to start and stop services so that you can manage running processes on Linux servers. The book will then demonstrate how to access and share files to or from Ubuntu Servers. You will learn how to create and manage databases using MariaDB and share web content with Apache. To virtualize hosts and applications, you will be shown how to set up KVM/Qemu and Docker and manage virtual machines with virt-manager. Lastly, you will explore best practices and troubleshooting techniques when working with Ubuntu Servers. By the end of the book, you will be an expert Ubuntu Server user well-versed in its advanced concepts.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering Ubuntu Server
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Monitoring memory usage


Understanding how Linux manages memory can actually be a somewhat complex topic, as understanding how much memory is truly free can be a small hurdle for newcomers to overcome. There's even a website dedicated to the topic of Linux RAM usage, which features a rather hilarious leading graphic: http://www.linuxatemyram.com/.

The front page of the linuxatemyram.com website

You'll soon see that how Linux manages memory on your server is actually fairly straight forward. For the purpose of monitoring memory usage on our server, we have the free command at our disposal, which we can use to see how much memory is being consumed at any given time. My favorite variation of this command is free -m, which shows the amount of memory in use in terms of megabytes. You can also use free -g to show the output in terms of gigabytes, but the output won't be precise enough on most servers. Giving the free command no option will result in the output being shown in terms of kilobytes:

Output...