Linux System Administration Recipes A Problem-Solution Approach

■ INTRODUCTIONChapter 4, “Taking Backups and Managing Data,” covers how to get your backups properly set upbefore the first time you need them and how to have rapid-restore in place in case of a serveremergency. Finally, you will learn how to rescue data from bad disks when for whatever reason yourbackups aren’t useful.Chapter 5, “Working with Filesystems,” covers editing and resizing your filesystems on the fly andusing RAID to your best advantage.Chapter 6, “Securing Your Systems,” covers SSH, password policy, sudo, Kerberos, Apache–thereare many parts of your systems where security matters. Test password strength yourself before anintruder does!Chapter 7, “Working with Apache,” includes a handful of recipes to help you out when you’re usingthe preeminent web server on the Internet.Chapter 8, “Using the Command Line Better,” covers bash, which is incredibly versatile. It pays tolearn more about it. This chapter also includes a find and xargs quick reference. Both find andxargs are great tools, but the man pages can be a bit alarming if you’re not already familiar withthem.Chapter 9, “Working with Text in Files,” covers less, sed, awk, and Perl, which all do useful thingswith text files. The final recipe looks at getting text out of other files, too.Chapter 10, “Things Going In, Things Going Out,” covers keyboard maps, printers, and remotedesktops.Chapter 11, “Tracking Down Bugs,” contains recipes about best practices and the best tools whenyou’re bug hunting, which sysadmins spend a lot of time doing, so it’s a good idea to make theprocess as pain-free as possible.Chapter 12, “Managing Time and People,” covers managing time and people. (Un?)fortunately, wedon’t spend all of our time with computers. Especially if you do any first-line user support, thinkingabout how you deal with your colleagues can make an enormous amount of difference to how yourworking life goes on a day-to-day basis. Similarly, managing your time between the multitude ofdemands on it is challenging but incredibly important to your well being at work.ConventionsLines starting with # indicate a root prompt. The code continuation character indicates that whatwould be a single line at the shell prompt or in a text file has been split onto multiple lines for ease oftypesetting in this book.PrerequisitesThe recipes have been tested on Debian 5.0 (lenny) and Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), which were thestable versions of both distributions at the time of this writing. Other Linux distros may vary slightly infile names and the way that various system issues are handled. I’ve tried to note some differences, butyou might need to make your own additional changes. The basic theory or idea behind each recipeshould be valid for any modern Linux distribution. Software versions are given in the text (in general,these will be the versions as packaged for Debian 5.0 and Ubuntu 9.04 at the time of this writing).xviDownload at WoweBook.Com