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 service units

Service units are the equivalent of init scripts on old SysV systems. We'll use them to configure our various services, which we used to call daemons in the old days. A service can be pretty much anything that you want to start automatically and run in the background. Examples of services include Secure Shell, your web server of choice, a mail server, and various services that are required for proper system operation. While some service files can be short and sweet, others can be fairly lengthy, with more options enabled. To read about all of these options, just type the following:

man systemd.directives

The descriptions for all of the parameters that you can set are spread over several different man pages. This systemd.directives man page is an index that will direct you to the proper man page for each parameter.

Rather than trying to explain every parameter that service files can use, let's look through a few example files and explain...