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)

Determining running services

Whenever you get to a box, especially one you're unsure of (that's been tucked in the back of a cupboard somewhere blinking to itself), it's a good idea to find out what software is running on it.

On modern systems (2013-ish plus), this is accomplished with the systemctl command.

systemctl is the main control mechanism for any systemd system—literally "system control". Think of it as the human frontend to your initialization software (the first software to run on your box, which manages all others), allowing you to modify and investigate the running state of your computer.

Not only that, in the Unix/Linux world everything is a file; your network connections are a file, your programs are a file, your devices are a file, and because of this you can control everything, just by modifying files.

But that gets tedious fast...