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

Servers are all well and good when they work, but we don't live in a perfect world, and it's perfectly possible that problems can occur (either through bad code, created by humans, or mismanagement, introduced by humans).

In theory, it would be great to simply install the program you want, set it running, and forget about it, but this is the real world, not some fantasy land where everything goes 100 percent right 100 percent of the time. This is where logging and monitoring shine.

Logging is there so that when something does, inevitably, go wrong, you don't have to keep your program in a broken state while you try and work out what's broken (though, on odd occasions, this might be precisely what you have to do; more about that later). You can bring your system back online, and start to parse the log files to find out precisely why your web server...