Linux System Administration Recipes A Problem-Solution Approach

■ CONTENTSIntroductionThis book is a collection of recipes for the working Linux sysadmin–a set of stand-alone quick guidesand tips that you can keep on your desk for easy reference. Hardcore in-depth manuals are great whenyou have the time to sit down and read through them thoroughly, but that’s not always the case whenyou have a bug that you needed fixed yesterday. This book is aimed at giving you tools to fix problemsfaster but also to help you set up software and systems to avoid problems showing up in the first place.Or at least to help you catch them sooner and solve them faster when they do show up. I wrote thisbecause when working as a sysadmin, I spent a lot of time hunting for just this sort of information. Thisis a collection of things that I’ve personally found useful and wanted to share with other people in myposition.Who This Book Is ForI’ve aimed this book primarily at the Linux sysadmin who’s been doing the job for a year or so and isstarting to get to grips with how things work. New sysadmins should find some things useful, but you’llneed at least some knowledge of how Linux works and how to fix it before you’ll really be able to use thebook. There’ll also be some tips that are useful to people who have a bit more experience–I know I keeplearning new things myself!The book will be particularly useful for someone working as a solo sysadmin in a smallish group orcompany, such as when you’re the person who has to fix both the user-level problems and the back-endissues, rather than having the luxury of concentrating on one particular area.How This Book Is StructuredAll recipes should be more or less stand-alone; although there are some sections with several recipes forone piece of software, in which case the basics will be covered only in the initial recipe(s), and later oneswill assume some knowledge of the software. In particular, there’s a lot of interdependence in theKerberos and LDAP recipes in Chapter 2.Here’s the chapter breakdown:Chapter 1, “Saving Yourself Effort,” includes tips to help you document your work better, to improveyour shell and Perl scripting (because you will have to read it again someday...), and to help youkeep a history of your configuration files by using version control.Chapter 2, “Centralizing Your Network: Kerberos, LDAP, and NFS,” includes recipes to get an LDAPand Kerberos setup running smoothly and also contains a few hints on adding NFS to the mix.Chapter 3, “Monitoring and Updating,” covers how to set up Nagios to monitor your servers andhow to set up Puppet to make configuration easier.xvDownload at WoweBook.Com