Book Image

Linux Service Management Made Easy with systemd

4 (1)
Book Image

Linux Service Management Made Easy with systemd

4 (1)

Overview of this book

Linux Service Management Made Easy with systemd will provide you with an in-depth understanding of systemd, so that you can set up your servers securely and efficiently.This is a comprehensive guide for Linux administrators that will help you get the best of systemd, starting with an explanation of the fundamentals of systemd management.You’ll also learn how to edit and create your own systemd units, which will be particularly helpful if you need to create custom services or timers and add features or security to an existing service. Next, you'll find out how to analyze and fix boot-up challenges and set system parameters. An overview of cgroups that'll help you control system resource usage for both processes and users will also be covered, alongside a practical demonstration on how cgroups are structured, spotting the differences between cgroups Version 1 and 2, and how to set resource limits on both. Finally, you'll learn about the systemd way of performing time-keeping, networking, logging, and login management. You'll discover how to configure servers accurately and gather system information to analyze system security and performance. By the end of this Linux book, you’ll be able to efficiently manage all aspects of a server running the systemd init system.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1: Using systemd
12
Section 2: Understanding cgroups
16
Section 3: Logging, Timekeeping, Networking, and Booting

Setting time and timezone parameters

Back in the Stone Age of computing, maintaining accurate time on a computer wasn't all that important. To set the time on my old 8088-powered Sanyo PC clone, I just typed in whatever my watch said. That wasn't the most accurate way of doing things, but it didn't matter. The only real reason to set the computer time at all was to have somewhat accurate timestamps on the files that I created.

Nowadays, accurate timekeeping on computers is vitally important for a lot of reasons. Fortunately, we now have the Network Time Protocol (NTP), which is a lot more accurate than what my old-fashioned wind-up wristwatch was. The systemd suite comes with the timedatectl utility and systemd-timedated.service to help us out. In this chapter, we'll talk about timedatectl, but we'll save discussing systemd-timedated.service until Chapter 17, Understanding systemd and Bootloaders.

To see the status of your machine's timekeeping,...