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 myth of popularity

We must balance the idea of believing that just because something is popular that it will have a lot of support available in the market with the idea of practical support. Just because a product is popular or has many people offering support for it does not mean that support is better or easier to obtain in a practical sense.

For years, this is something that we have discussed about Windows and Linux operating systems. There were, and remain, far more Windows system administrators marketing themselves on the market than there are Linux administrators. But experience tells us that when hiring an administrator in the Linux world it is relatively easy to find at least reasonably qualified candidates. Run a series of interviews and almost every candidate will be able to do the job, even if not well. But run a similar interview looking for the exact same position but for Windows instead of for Linux and you will likely get twice or thrice the candidates to wade...