Book Image

Linux Administration Cookbook

By : Adam K. Dean
Book Image

Linux Administration Cookbook

By: Adam K. Dean

Overview of this book

Linux is one of the most widely used operating systems among system administrators,and even modern application and server development is heavily reliant on the Linux platform. The Linux Administration Cookbook is your go-to guide to get started on your Linux journey. It will help you understand what that strange little server is doing in the corner of your office, what the mysterious virtual machine languishing in Azure is crunching through, what that circuit-board-like thing is doing under your office TV, and why the LEDs on it are blinking rapidly. This book will get you started with administering Linux, giving you the knowledge and tools you need to troubleshoot day-to-day problems, ranging from a Raspberry Pi to a server in Azure, while giving you a good understanding of the fundamentals of how GNU/Linux works. Through the course of the book, you’ll install and configure a system, while the author regales you with errors and anecdotes from his vast experience as a data center hardware engineer, systems administrator, and DevOps consultant. By the end of the book, you will have gained practical knowledge of Linux, which will serve as a bedrock for learning Linux administration and aid you in your Linux journey.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Dependency hell (a quick word)

We will now take a trip down memory lane; specifically, the author is going to curl up into a ball for a couple of hours while he recalls hours of yelling at servers for being dumb.

Dependency hell is the notion that a package can have dependencies on things that either conflict with other versions of dependent packages or libraries that you have installed, or can try to use incompatible versions, for whatever reason.

In the case of Python and Pip, we've already discussed the concept of virtualenv, but historically, this has also been a problem in other package managers, too. RPM-based distributions are notorious for these issues, developing the term RPM Hell to specifically reference their problems.

You can also get into a situation where there are a few options for dependencies when installing software; programs like Apt attempt to mitigate...