Book Image

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Troubleshooting Guide

By : Benjamin Cane
Book Image

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Troubleshooting Guide

By: Benjamin Cane

Overview of this book

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an operating system that allows you to modernize your infrastructure, boost efficiency through virtualization, and finally prepare your data center for an open, hybrid cloud IT architecture. It provides the stability to take on today's challenges and the flexibility to adapt to tomorrow's demands. In this book, you begin with simple troubleshooting best practices and get an overview of the Linux commands used for troubleshooting. The book will cover the troubleshooting methods for web applications and services such as Apache and MySQL. Then, you will learn to identify system performance bottlenecks and troubleshoot network issues; all while learning about vital troubleshooting steps such as understanding the problem statement, establishing a hypothesis, and understanding trial, error, and documentation. Next, the book will show you how to capture and analyze network traffic, use advanced system troubleshooting tools such as strace, tcpdump & dmesg, and discover common issues with system defaults. Finally, the book will take you through a detailed root cause analysis of an unexpected reboot where you will learn to recover a downed system.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Troubleshooting Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Finding useful information


Before starting to explore troubleshooting commands, I first want to cover locations of useful information. Useful information is a bit of a vague term, pretty much every file, directory, or command can provide useful information. What I really plan to cover are places where it is possible to find information for almost any issue.

Log files

Log files are often the first place to start looking for troubleshooting information. Whenever a service or server is experiencing an issue, checking the log files for errors can often answer many questions quickly.

The default location

By default, RHEL and most Linux distributions keep their log files in /var/log/, which is actually part of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) maintained by the Linux Foundation. However, while /var/log/ might be the default location not all log files are located there (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard).

While /var/log/httpd/ is the default location for Apache logs, this...