In this chapter, we covered more advanced system administration topics. We first covered command aliases, which we can use to shorten long commands that are easier to type. Then, we went over how to make aliases stick between sessions, since they are normally wiped out when the shell is closed. From there, we worked through how to kill processes and how to create cron jobs to automate common tasks. We also covered best practices when dealing with moving to a new distribution release, as well as how to back up a list of packages installed on our system for import later. Our coverage in this chapter also included diving deeper into bash scripting and even creating reports, so we can get e-mail messages containing important details about our system that we would like to be kept up to date about.

In the next chapter, we're going to take a look at what to do when things go wrong. For example, we will look at as diagnosing boot issues, recovering data, testing RAM, pinpointing issues with...