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)

Introduction

Your hardware doesn't care for you, like you might care for it.

Hardware is fickle, temperamental, unpredictable, and moody; disks, the rebellious teenager of the hardware family, take this to the next level.

You will find yourself confused at some point in your career, baffled as to why seemingly unrelated errors are occurring in disparate parts of your system. Your SSH daemon might be randomly dying at odd points in a transfer, NTP might be drifting, your database might be locking up, and all the while you're tearing your hair out trying to find the cause.

Hardware is usually the answer to these random issues (when it's not time, as we discussed previously). A bad stick of memory can fail in weird and wonderful ways, while a disk occasionally going read-only can mean sporadic and nighttime-disrupting events that can be tempting to resolve with a particularly...