The Linux System Administrator's Guide

Version 0.9

Lars Wirzenius

                
                

Joanna Oja

                
                

Stephen Stafford

                
                

Alex Weeks

                
                

An introduction to system administration of a Linux system for novices.

Legal Notice
Table of Contents
About This Book
1. Acknowledgments
2. Revision History
3. Source and pre-formatted versions available
4. Typographical Conventions
1. Introduction
1.1. Linux or GNU/Linux, that is the question.
1.2. Trademarks
2. Overview of a Linux System
2.1. Various parts of an operating system
2.2. Important parts of the kernel
2.3. Major services in a UNIX system
3. Overview of the Directory Tree
3.1. Background
3.2. The root filesystem
3.3. The /etc directory
3.4. The /dev directory
3.5. The /usr filesystem.
3.6. The /var filesystem
3.7. The /proc filesystem
4. Hardware, Devices, and Tools
4.1. Hardware Utilities
4.2. Kernel Modules
5. Using Disks and Other Storage Media
5.1. Two kinds of devices
5.2. Hard disks
5.3. Storage Area Networks - Draft
5.4. Network Attached Storage - Draft
5.5. Floppies
5.6. CD-ROMs
5.7. Tapes
5.8. Formatting
5.9. Partitions
5.10. Filesystems
5.11. Disks without filesystems
5.12. Allocating disk space
6. Memory Management
6.1. What is virtual memory?
6.2. Creating a swap space
6.3. Using a swap space
6.4. Sharing swap spaces with other operating systems
6.5. Allocating swap space
6.6. The buffer cache
7. System Monitoring
7.1. System Resources
7.2. Filesystem Usage
7.3. Monitoring Users
8. Boots And Shutdowns
8.1. An overview of boots and shutdowns
8.2. The boot process in closer look
8.3. More about shutdowns
8.4. Rebooting
8.5. Single user mode
8.6. Emergency boot floppies
9. init
9.1. init comes first
9.2. Configuring init to start getty: the /etc/inittab file
9.3. Run levels
9.4. Special configuration in /etc/inittab
9.5. Booting in single user mode
10. Logging In And Out
10.1. Logins via terminals
10.2. Logins via the network
10.3. What login does
10.4. X and xdm
10.5. Access control
10.6. Shell startup
11. Managing user accounts
11.1. What's an account?
11.2. Creating a user
11.3. Changing user properties
11.4. Removing a user
11.5. Disabling a user temporarily
12. Backups
12.1. On the importance of being backed up
12.2. Selecting the backup medium
12.3. Selecting the backup tool
12.4. Simple backups
12.5. Multilevel backups
12.6. What to back up
12.7. Compressed backups
13. Task Automation --To Be Added
14. Keeping Time
14.1. The concept of localtime
14.2. The hardware and software clocks
14.3. Showing and setting time
14.4. When the clock is wrong
14.5. NTP - Network Time Protocol
14.6. Basic NTP configuration
14.7. NTP Toolkit
14.8. Some known NTP servers
14.9. NTP Links
15. System Logs --To Be Added
16. System Updates --To Be Added
17. The Linux Kernel Source
18. Finding Help
18.1. Newsgroups and Mailing Lists
18.2. IRC
A. GNU Free Documentation License
A.1. PREAMBLE
A.2. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
A.3. VERBATIM COPYING
A.4. COPYING IN QUANTITY
A.5. MODIFICATIONS
A.6. COMBINING DOCUMENTS
A.7. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS
A.8. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS
A.9. TRANSLATION
A.10. TERMINATION
A.11. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE
A.12. ADDENDUM: How to use this License for your documents
Glossary (DRAFT, but not for long hopefully)
Index-Draft
List of Tables
5-1. Comparing Filesystem Features
5-2. Sizes
5-3. My Partitions
9-1. Run level numbers
12-1. Efficient backup scheme using many backup levels
List of Figures
2-1. Some of the more important parts of the Linux kernel
3-1. Parts of a Unix directory tree. Dashed lines indicate partition limits.
5-1. A schematic picture of a hard disk.
5-2. A sample hard disk partitioning.
5-3. Three separate filesystems.
5-4. /home and /usr have been mounted.
10-1. Logins via terminals: the interaction of init, getty, login, and the shell.
12-1. A sample multilevel backup schedule.
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