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

The GUI and the CLI: Administration best practices

If you are coming to Linux from the Windows world, you may be excused from realizing that nearly everything should be done from the command line, not from the graphical user interface. But really, even on Windows, Microsoft has been very clear, for a very long time, that the desktop experience is really for end users and not for system administrators and that they recommend either using PowerShell as the administration tool of choice when working on a local system directly or any number of remove management tools that connect via an API. Microsoft pushes quite hard to encourage those installing their systems for the past few generations to install their operating systems and hypervisors without graphical user interfaces at all.

Graphical User Interfaces, or GUIs as we will call them now to keep things short, present a lot of problems for system administrators.

The first issue with GUIs is bloat. During the installation of an...