Book Image

Linux Administration Cookbook

By : Adam K. Dean
Book Image

Linux Administration Cookbook

By: Adam K. Dean

Overview of this book

Linux is one of the most widely used operating systems among system administrators,and even modern application and server development is heavily reliant on the Linux platform. The Linux Administration Cookbook is your go-to guide to get started on your Linux journey. It will help you understand what that strange little server is doing in the corner of your office, what the mysterious virtual machine languishing in Azure is crunching through, what that circuit-board-like thing is doing under your office TV, and why the LEDs on it are blinking rapidly. This book will get you started with administering Linux, giving you the knowledge and tools you need to troubleshoot day-to-day problems, ranging from a Raspberry Pi to a server in Azure, while giving you a good understanding of the fundamentals of how GNU/Linux works. Through the course of the book, you’ll install and configure a system, while the author regales you with errors and anecdotes from his vast experience as a data center hardware engineer, systems administrator, and DevOps consultant. By the end of the book, you will have gained practical knowledge of Linux, which will serve as a bedrock for learning Linux administration and aid you in your Linux journey.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Generating and using key pairs with ssh-keygen

Passwords are great, but they're also terrible.

Most people use weak passwords, and while I hope that's not you, there's always the chance that someone in your team doesn't have the discipline you do, and resorts to football99 or similar for connecting to your shared remote host.

With password access enabled, anyone might be able to connect to your server from any country by brute-forcing their way into your machine, given enough time and enough processing power.

I say "might" because as long as you use secure passwords of a decent length, passwords can be hard to guess, even with the power of a sun. Consult your company security policy when deciding these things, or read up on the best practices at the time you're writing the policy yourself.

Here's where keys come in.

SSH keys are based on...