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

Log management and security

If you ask system administrators in casual conversation at the bar, you might believe that it is a major task for system administrators to collect all of their system logs and to spend hours each day manually and skillfully going through them line by line looking for system errors and malicious actors. Reality is very different. No one is doing this, no one was ever doing this, and no company is interested in paying for people to do this. Log reading is a serious skill and an activity that is excessively boring. It is also a type of task at which humans are extremely poor.

If you were to attempt to have humans doing your log management by actually reading logs when there is nothing known to be wrong with a system you would run into a few problems. First, realistically no human can read logs fast enough to be truly effective. Systems log a lot of data and attempting to keep up with that kind of flow of truly mindless information would make humans extremely...