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

Backup strategies & mechanisms

Backups are actually far more complex animals than most people imagine. So often when dealing with backups we are simply told to take a backup as if this is a straightforward activity with few variables. In the real world we do have some stock approaches that meet the majority of needs, if only minimally. There are cases, however, where to do effective backups requires a lot more thought and deep understanding of our workloads and infrastructure to be able to get correct.

In the good old days, you know like the 1980s and 1990s, backups were almost always the same. They involved a simplistic agent of some sort, like the standard Linux tar command, that would run on a schedule (that we probably had to set manually with something like cron) that would take all of the files in a directory or, more likely, the entire system and package them up as a single file and place that single, large file onto a tape device. That tape device would then require...