Book Image

Mastering Linux Administration

By : Alexandru Calcatinge, Julian Balog
Book Image

Mastering Linux Administration

By: Alexandru Calcatinge, Julian Balog

Overview of this book

Linux plays a significant role in modern data center management and provides great versatility in deploying and managing your workloads on-premises and in the cloud. This book covers the important topics you need to know about for your everyday Linux administration tasks. The book starts by helping you understand the Linux command line and how to work with files, packages, and filesystems. You'll then begin administering network services and hardening security, and learn about cloud computing, containers, and orchestration. Once you've learned how to work with the command line, you'll explore the essential Linux commands for managing users, processes, and daemons and discover how to secure your Linux environment using application security frameworks and firewall managers. As you advance through the chapters, you'll work with containers, hypervisors, virtual machines, Ansible, and Kubernetes. You'll also learn how to deploy Linux to the cloud using AWS and Azure. By the end of this Linux book, you'll be well-versed with Linux and have mastered everyday administrative tasks using workflows spanning from on-premises to the cloud. If you also find yourself adopting DevOps practices in the process, we'll consider our mission accomplished.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Linux Basic Administration
7
Section 2: Advanced Linux Server Administration
13
Section 3: Cloud Administration

Understanding devices in Linux

As already stated on several occasions in this book, everything in Linux is a file. This includes devices, too. Device files are special files in UNIX and Linux operating systems. Those special files are basically an interface to device drivers, and they are present in the filesystem as a regular file.

Linux abstraction layers

Now is as good a time as any to discuss Linux system abstraction layers and how devices fit into the overall picture. A Linux system is generally organized on three major levels: the hardware level, kernel level, and user space level.

The hardware level contains the hardware components of your machine, such as the memory (RAM), Central Processing Unit (CPU), and devices including disks, network interfaces, ports, and controllers. The memory is divided into two separate regions, called kernel space and user space.

The kernel is the beating heart of the Linux operating system. The kernel resides inside the memory (RAM...