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

Summary

System patching, updates, and reboots may feel very pedantic. And in some ways, I suppose that they are. But sometimes really important things can also be kind of boring. And really, patching and basic system maintenance should be boring. It should be predictable, reliable, and scheduled. And if at all possible, it should be automated.

Patching should not become a challenge or a scary proposition. With proper planning, backups, testing and so forth, it is generally easy to have a reliable patching and even update processes that very rarely experience major issues of any kind. If we fail to make our patching and updates regular and reliable, we will begin to fear the process which will almost certainly lead us to avoid it more which will just exacerbate the problem.

In the modern world of computing, there is always someone looking to exploit our systems and while nothing can protect against every possible attack, we can heavily mitigate our exposure through rapid, regular...