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

Chapter 11: Troubleshooting

Few things are as challenging in systems administration as troubleshooting when problems have risen. Troubleshooting is hard at the best of times, but as system administrators our job is almost always to troubleshoot a system that is either currently running in production and has to remain functional while we attempt to fix some aspect of it or is currently down and we have to get it back up and running in production as quickly as possible. The ability to work at a reasonable pace without the business losing money actively as we do so typically does not exist for us or when it does, is the exception rather than the rule. Troubleshooting is hard, critical, and stressful.

Troubleshooting involves more than just fixing an obvious technical problem, applying business logic is critical as well. We have to understand our troubleshooting in the greater context of the workload and the business and apply more than simple technical know-how. There is fixing a problem...