Book Image

Mastering Ubuntu Server

By : Jay LaCroix
Book Image

Mastering Ubuntu Server

By: Jay LaCroix

Overview of this book

Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux operating system, and has various versions targeted at servers, desktops, phones, tablets and televisions. The Ubuntu Server Edition, also called Ubuntu Server, offers support for several common configurations, and also simplifies common Linux server deployment processes. With this book as their guide, readers will be able to configure and deploy Ubuntu Servers using Ubuntu Server 16.04, with all the skills necessary to manage real servers. The book begins with the concept of user management, group management, as well as file-system permissions. To manage your storage on Ubuntu Server systems, you will learn how to add and format storage and view disk usage. Later, you will also learn how to configure network interfaces, manage IP addresses, deploy Network Manager in order to connect to networks, and manage network interfaces. Furthermore, you will understand how to start and stop services so that you can manage running processes on Linux servers. The book will then demonstrate how to access and share files to or from Ubuntu Servers. You will learn how to create and manage databases using MariaDB and share web content with Apache. To virtualize hosts and applications, you will be shown how to set up KVM/Qemu and Docker and manage virtual machines with virt-manager. Lastly, you will explore best practices and troubleshooting techniques when working with Ubuntu Servers. By the end of the book, you will be an expert Ubuntu Server user well-versed in its advanced concepts.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering Ubuntu Server
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using symbolic and hard links


With Linux, we can link files to other files, which gives us quite a bit of flexibility with how we can manage our data. Symbolic and hard links are very similar, but to explain them, you'll first need to understand the concept of inodes.

We already discussed inodes earlier in this chapter. But as a refresher, an inode is a data object that contains metadata regarding files within your filesystem. Inodes are represented by an integer number, which you can view with the -i option of the ls command. On my system, I created two files: file1 and file2. These files are inodes 543815 and 558287 respectively. You can see this output in the following screenshot where I run the ls -i command. This information will come in handy shortly.

Output of ls -i

There are two types of links in Linux: Symbolic Links and Hard Links. This concept is similar in purpose to shortcuts created in graphical user interfaces. Almost all graphical operating systems have a means of creating a...