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Linux Administration Best Practices

Linux Administration Best Practices


Linux is a well-known, open source Unix-family operating system that is the most widely used OS today. Linux looks set for a bright future for decades to come, but system administration is rarely studied beyond learning rote tasks or following vendor guidelines. To truly excel at Linux administration, you need to understand how these systems work and learn to make strategic decisions regarding them.

Linux Administration Best Practices helps you to explore best practices for efficiently administering Linux systems and servers. This Linux book covers a wide variety of topics from installation and deployment through to managing permissions, with each topic beginning with an overview of the key concepts followed by practical examples of best practices and solutions. You'll find out how to approach system administration, Linux, and IT in general, put technology into proper business context, and rethink your approach to technical decision making. Finally, the book concludes by helping you to understand best practices for troubleshooting Linux systems and servers that'll enable you to grow in your career as well as in any aspect of IT and business.

By the end of this Linux administration book, you'll have gained the knowledge needed to take your Linux administration skills to the next level.

  • Linux Administration Best Practices
  • Contributors
  • About the author
  • About the reviewer
  • Preface
    • Who this book is for
    • What this book covers
    • To get the most out of this book
    • Download the color images
    • Conventions used
    • Get in touch
    • Share Your Thoughts
  • Section 1: Understanding the Role of Linux System Administrator
  • Chapter 1: What Is the Role of a System Administrator?
    • Where are system administrators in the real world?
    • Wearing the administrator and engineering hats
      • The difference between the role of an administrator and the role of an engineer
      • Hats
      • The wonderous variety of the role
    • Understanding systems in the business ecosystem
    • Learning system administration
      • Build a home lab
      • Getting family and friends involved
      • Start as a generalist and progress onto a specialist in the System Administrator field
      • Volunteer for non-profits or non-business organizations
      • Self-study
      • Age does not matter
      • Internships
    • Introducing the IT Professional
      • The fallacy of success at any cost
    • Summary
  • Chapter 2: Choosing Your Distribution and Release Model
    • Understanding Linux in production
    • Is Linux UNIX?
    • Linux licensing
    • Key vendors and products
      • What about BSD?
      • Debian
      • Ubuntu
      • IBM Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
      • RHEL alternatives
      • Fedora
      • OpenSUSE and SLES
      • Digging into distribution history
      • Other Linux distributions
    • The myth of popularity
      • Using multiple distributions
      • Making the choice
    • Releases and support: LTS, current, and rolling
      • What does support mean?
      • Release model: rapid release
      • Release model: LTS
      • Release and support schedule interplay: The overlap
      • Release model: Rolling
      • Why not just update the packages manually
      • Choosing the release model for our workloads
    • Choosing your distribution
      • Do not fear risk
    • Summary
  • Section 2: Best Practices for Linux Technologies
  • Chapter 3: System Storage Best Practices
    • Exploring key factors in storage
      • Cost
      • Durability
      • Availability
      • Performance
      • Scalability
      • Capacity
    • Understanding block storage: Local and SAN
      • Locally attached block storage
      • Storage Area Networks (SAN)
      • The terrible terminology of SAN
    • Surveying filesystems and network filesystems
      • EXT4
      • XFS
      • ZFS
      • BtrFS
      • Clustered file systems
      • Network filesystems
    • Getting to know logical volume management (LVM)
      • Whatever happen to partitions
    • Utilizing RAID and RAIN
      • RAID
      • RAIN
    • Learning about replicated local storage
      • DRBD
      • Gluster and CEPH
      • Proprietary and third-party open-source solutions
      • Virtualization abstraction of storage
    • Analyzing storage architectures and risk
      • General storage architectures
      • Simple local storage: The brick
      • RLS: The ultra-high reliability solution
      • The lab environment: Remote shared standard storage
      • The giant scale: Remote replicated storage
      • Storage best practices
    • Storage example
    • Summary
  • Chapter 4: Designing System Deployment Architectures
    • Virtualization
      • Type 1 hypervisor
      • Type 2 hypervisor
      • Hypervisor types are confusing
      • VMware ESXi
      • Microsoft Hyper-V
      • Xen
      • KVM
      • Is virtualization only for consolidation?
    • Containerization
    • Cloud and VPS
      • Virtual Private Servers (VPS)
    • On premises, hosted, and hybrid hosting
      • Colocation
    • System Design Architecture
      • Standalone server, aka the snowflake
      • Simple does not necessarily mean simple
      • Many to many servers and storage
      • Viewing the world as a workload
      • Layered high availability
      • Reliability is relative
      • Hyperconvergence
      • Best practices in System Design Architecture
      • Risk assessment and availability needs
      • Workload interplay
      • Defining high availability
    • Summary
  • Chapter 5: Patch Management Strategies
    • Binary, source, and script software deployments
      • Compiled and interpreted software
      • Misleading use of source installation
    • Patching theory and strategies
      • The risk of delayed patching
      • Avoiding patches because of Windows
      • Testing patches is rarely feasible
      • Timeliness of patching
    • Compilations for the administrator
      • The compilation era
      • Compilation by engineering department
    • Linux deployment and redeployment
    • Rebooting servers
      • Finding your green zone
      • Avoiding planned downtime is planning for unplanned downtime
    • Summary
  • Chapter 6: Databases
    • Separating a Database from a DBMS
      • The Database
      • The Database engine
      • The Database management system
    • Comparing relational and NoSQL databases
    • Discovering common databases on Linux
      • Common relational databases on Linux
      • Drop In replacements
      • Common NoSQL Database Products on Linux
      • Document databases
    • Understanding database replication and data protection concepts
    • Summary
  • Section 3: Approaches to Effective System Administration
  • Chapter 7: Documentation, Monitoring, and Logging Techniques
    • Modern documentation: Wiki, live docs, repos
      • Repos
      • Ticketing systems
      • Approaching documentation
    • Tooling and impact
      • Netdata
    • Capacity planning
      • It Is already designed when purchased
    • Log management and security
      • Why central logging?
    • Alerts and troubleshooting
      • On-device and centralized alerting systems
      • Pushed and pulled alerts
      • In house and hosted monitoring
      • RMMs and monitoring
    • Summary
  • Chapter 8: Improving Administration Maturation with Automation through Scripting and DevOps
    • The GUI and the CLI: Administration best practices
      • Consolidation and the age of squeezing systems
    • Automation maturity
      • Local and remote automation
      • Command line
      • Scheduled tasks
      • Scripting
      • PowerShell on Linux
      • Scripting combined with task scheduling
      • State management
    • Infrastructure as code
      • Platforms and systems
    • Modern tools of automation
      • Configuration management systems
      • Version control systems
    • Summary
  • Chapter 9: Backup and Disaster Recovery Approaches
    • Agents and crash consistency
      • Locking mechanisms in Linux
      • MySQL example with mysqldump utility
    • Backup strategies & mechanisms
      • Types of backups
    • Snapshots, archives, backups, and disaster recovery
      • Snapshots
      • Archives
      • Backups
      • Disaster recovery
    • Backups in a DevOps world
      • Version control systems
      • IT provides solutions, vendors sell components
    • Triage concepts
    • Summary
  • Chapter 10: User and Access Management Strategies
    • Local and remote users
    • User management mechanisms
      • Using automation to turn local uses into remote users
      • The famous RDP exposure risk
      • Are operating system logins relevant in the modern world?
    • Remote access approaches
      • How do I approach remote access
    • SSH, key management, and jump boxes
      • Do you still need both a network edge firewall and an operating system firewall?
      • Does changing the default port of SSH work?
      • SSH key management
      • Jump boxes
    • Alternative remote access approaches
    • Terminal servers and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)
      • Understanding terminal services and VDI conceptually
    • Summary
  • Chapter 11: Troubleshooting
    • The high cost of disaster avoidance
    • Sources of solutions
      • There is no magic support
      • Visualizing what IT handles and what engineering handles
      • IT vendor managements
    • Triage skills and staff
      • I can give status, or I can fix things
      • Staffing for triage: The perceiver
    • Logical approaches to troubleshooting
      • Stories of troubleshooting
      • Technical social media in problem solving
    • Investigating versus fixing
    • Summary
      • The postmortem
    • Why subscribe?
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