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

Editing an existing service

We've seen that the unit files for our services live in the /lib/systemd/system/ directory, so your first instinct might be to go there and edit files in your favorite text editor. You don't want to do that though, even though it would work. If you were to do a system update, it might overwrite the files that you edited, and you'd lose your changes.

The proper way to do this is to create edited versions of your service files in the /etc/systemd/system/ directory. You can do that with your favorite text editor, the same as you would with any other configuration file. Indeed, that's the way that you used to have to do it. When Red Hat released RHEL 7.2, they added an edit function to the systemctl command, which makes life much easier. (Of course, that edit function is now available on all Linux distros that run systemd.)

Note

It has been brought to my attention that some people prefer to add their own custom unit files to the...