Book Image

Linux Administration Best Practices

By : Scott Alan Miller
3.3 (3)
Book Image

Linux Administration Best Practices

3.3 (3)
By: Scott Alan Miller

Overview of this book

Linux is a well-known, open source Unix-family operating system that is the most widely used OS today. Linux looks set for a bright future for decades to come, but system administration is rarely studied beyond learning rote tasks or following vendor guidelines. To truly excel at Linux administration, you need to understand how these systems work and learn to make strategic decisions regarding them. Linux Administration Best Practices helps you to explore best practices for efficiently administering Linux systems and servers. This Linux book covers a wide variety of topics from installation and deployment through to managing permissions, with each topic beginning with an overview of the key concepts followed by practical examples of best practices and solutions. You'll find out how to approach system administration, Linux, and IT in general, put technology into proper business context, and rethink your approach to technical decision making. Finally, the book concludes by helping you to understand best practices for troubleshooting Linux systems and servers that'll enable you to grow in your career as well as in any aspect of IT and business. By the end of this Linux administration book, you'll have gained the knowledge needed to take your Linux administration skills to the next level.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Understanding the Role of Linux System Administrator
4
Section 2: Best Practices for Linux Technologies
9
Section 3: Approaches to Effective System Administration

Modern documentation: Wiki, live docs, repos

The thing about documentation is that everyone admits that it is important, everyone talks about it, and almost no one does it or if they do, they don't keep it up to date. Documentation is boring, often harder than it seems to do well, and because almost no management will ever follow up and verify it, extremely easy to ignore. No one ever gets promoted because of excellent documentation, no one throws documentation parties, and no one talks about it on their curriculum vitae. Documentation just is not cool enough for people to want to spend time talking about.

Documentation is, however uncool it might feel, amazingly important for so many reasons. It can go far for moving someone from being an acceptable system administrator to being a great one.

Documentation does some interesting things. Of course, it allows us to recall how systems work and what tasks need to be done to them. It allows us to hand off tasks to others. It...