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

Understanding the history of cgroups

This might shock you, but the cgroups technology didn't start as a part of systemd, and it wasn't invented by Red Hat. It's actually a component in the Linux kernel that can run on non-systemd Linux distros. A pair of Google engineers started cgroups development back in 2006, four years before Red Hat engineers started developing systemd. The first enterprise-grade Linux distro to include cgroups technology was Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, which ran a hybrid upstart/SysV setup instead of systemd. Using cgroups on RHEL 6 was optional, and you had to jump through some hoops to set them up.

Nowadays, cgroups are enabled by default on all of the major enterprise-type Linux distros and are tightly integrated with systemd. RHEL 7 was the first enterprise distro to use systemd and was also the first enterprise distro to always have cgroups enabled.

There are currently two versions of the cgroups technology. Version 1 works well for...