Book Image

Mastering Ubuntu Server - Second Edition

By : Jay LaCroix
Book Image

Mastering Ubuntu Server - Second Edition

By: Jay LaCroix

Overview of this book

Ubuntu Server has taken the data centers by storm. Whether you're deploying Ubuntu for a large-scale project or for a small office, it is a stable, customizable, and powerful Linux distribution that leads the way with innovative and cutting-edge features. For both simple and complex server deployments, Ubuntu's flexible nature can be easily adapted to meet to the needs of your organization. With this book as your guide, you will learn all about Ubuntu Server, from initial deployment to creating production-ready resources for your network. The book begins with the concept of user management, group management, and filesystem permissions. Continuing into managing storage volumes, you will learn how to format storage devices, utilize logical volume management, and monitor disk usage. Later, you will learn how to virtualize hosts and applications, which will cover setting up KVM/QEMU, as well as containerization with both Docker and LXD. As the book continues, you will learn how to automate configuration with Ansible, as well as take a look at writing scripts. Lastly, you will explore best practices and troubleshooting techniques when working with Ubuntu Server that are applicable to real-world scenarios. By the end of the book, you will be an expert Ubuntu Server administrator who is well-versed in its advanced concepts.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)

Making your servers do your bidding

As server administrators, we're control freaks. There are few things more exciting than executing a command and having every single server obey it and carry it out. Now that we have Ansible set up, that's exactly what we're going to do. I'm assuming by now you have some machines you want to configure, and they're all set up to communicate via SSH with your central server. Also, as I mentioned before, I highly recommend you utilize something like Git to store your configuration files, but that's not required for this section.

First, we'll need an inventory file, which is a special text file Ansible expects to find that tells it where to find servers to connect to. By default, the name of this file is simply hosts and Ansible expects to find this file in the /etc/ansible directory.

There's actually a way...