Mastering Linux Administration

The recent years have marked a significant rise in the adoption of Linux as the operating system of choice for both server and desktop computing platforms. Linux plays a significant role in modern data center management and provides great versatility in deploying and managing your workloads on-premises and in the cloud. This book covers the important topics you need to know about for your everyday Linux administration tasks. Frankly, Linux server management involving a cloud server is a lot easier. There are some similarities with managing a dedicated server but there are quite a few points you simply won’t need to take care of. First and foremost, though some dedicated server providers will look after your hardware, many won’t, and dedicated server management could involve hardware management.

  • Choosing a Linux server means you get the benefit of high levels of security and solid stability, while retaining a large degree of flexibility.
  • Stay up to date with the newest courses, certifications, and promotions from the LF training team.
  • This provides only the most basic outline of how to use these text editors, and there are numerous external resources which will provide instructions for more advanced use of this software.
  • They will document and upgrade system software and hardware products.
  • From 2020 to 2030, the BLS projects an increase of 5% for the category of network and computer systems administrators with 18,800 net new jobs expected during that 10-year period.
  • I first ran across Linux in a magazine where I could purchase a 2 CD set in early 1995 when I worked at WorldCom .

CompTIA Network+ helps develop a career in IT infrastructure covering troubleshooting, configuring and managing networks. The new CompTIA Network+ N exam was released in September 2021. It’s recommended that you become CompTIA Network+ certified or have equivalent knowledge and experience before pursuing CompTIA Linux+.

System Services

The default configuration of htop presents all application threads as independent processes, which may not be clear if you’re not aware of it. You can disable this by selecting the “setup” option with F2, then “Display Options,” and then toggling the “Hide userland threads” option. Network DiagnosticsIn this section, we’ll review some basic Linux commands that will help you assess and diagnose network problems. If you suspect connectivity issues, adding the output from the relevant commands to your support ticket can help our staff diagnose your issue. This is particularly helpful in cases where networking issues are intermittent. Set the Time ZoneWhen setting the time zone of your server, it may be best to use the time zone of the majority of your users. If you’re not sure which time zone would be best, consider using Universal Coordinated Time or UTC (i.e., Greenwich Mean Time).

  • Any unexpected connection should be investigated as it could be the result of an intrusion.
  • If you use SSH keys, you can use the scp command without entering a password for every transfer.
  • Self-education is commendable but you’ll have significant gaps in your learning.
  • Linux system administration is a process of setting up, configuring, and managing a computer system in a Linuxoperating system software environment.
  • The media server package for Ubuntu is only available for Intel/AMD platforms.
  • The package manager for Debian and most of its derivatives is Debian Package .

With 13 years of experience in architectural programming and development, Alex teaches students about smart cities, big data, and open source technologies. He has authored four books and numerous scientific articles on urban and regional planning, https://remotemode.net/ with an emphasis on open source technologies in urban and rural development. In today’s increasingly rapid and agile development environments, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) infrastructures make heavy use of Linux distros.

What Should a Linux Administrator Should Know?

CentOS is relatively lightweight, coming only with barebone server components and an operating system networking stack. It is widely available as a VPS deployment template in private and public cloud vendors.

Learning Objectives – In this module of linux admin certification, you will understand the file system management which includes mounting, unmounting and automounter techniques. We will discuss details of file system security and also understand how permissions are applied. A system administrator manages configuration, upkeep and reliable operations of computer operations. Sysadmin linux lessons handles servers, has to manage system performance and security without exceeding the budget to meet users need. If you need an easy-to-install email solution, consider the Citadel groupware server. Citadel provides an integrated “turnkey” solution that includes an SMTP server, remote mailbox access, real time collaboration tools including XMPP, and a shared calendar interface.

Step 2 – create a bootable media

Step 4) The new account would show, but would be disabled by default. The Linux operating system is used as a client-side and server-side operating system. Before you go ahead with this tutorial, we assume that you have a basic knowledge of Linux and Administration fundamentals.

  • With WSL enabled, you can easily install and run Linux as a native Windows application.
  • With its current GNOME 3 iteration, this GUI platform is one of the most common Linux desktop environments.
  • This course will teach you the skills and processes you need to work as a professional Linux systems administrator.
  • Detecting and solving the service problems ranging from disaster recovery to login problems.

Most of the distribution templates that Linode provides come with an implementation of the vi/vim text editor and the nano text editor. These are small, lightweight and powerful text editors that allow you manipulate the text of a file from the terminal environment. This will find and match against every occurrence of the word “morris,” while ignoring case (because of the option for -i). The grep tool will search all files in the ~/org/ directory with a .txt extension. This provides information regarding the maintainer, the dependencies, the size, the homepage of the upstream project, and a description of the software. You can append | grep “” to these commands to filter package list results, or | less to display the results in a pager, regardless of distribution.

Ubuntu

In this section, we briefly illustrate the installation of CentOS. If we plan to install CentOS in a VM, there are some preliminary steps required for provisioning the VM environment. In this section, we briefly illustrate the installation of Ubuntu Server LTS. If we plan to install Ubuntu in a VM, there are some preliminary steps required for provisioning the VM environment. The difference between installing Linux on a VM compared to a physical machine is minor. The notable distinction is related to the VM sizing and configuration steps, making sure that the minimum system requirements of the Linux distribution are met.

Does a system admin need to know how do you code?

Although a system admin is not a programmer, they need to have some skills and experience in coding and scripting to assist software engineers. This is where your past experience as a developer kicks in. Also, knowing languages such as Python and Ruby is a plus.

The following section presents some hands-on use cases, where, depending on specific functional requirements, we choose the right Linux distribution. Monitor your network connections with iftop, the tool that shows you the active network connections to your server. Any unexpected connection should be investigated as it could be the result of an intrusion. Check out nload, which will show you what is consuming the most bandwidth on your machine and whether there are any network glitches. If so, download the exam objectives for CompTIA Linux+ to learn more. Check out CompTIA’s Tech Job Report video series now premiering onCompTIA Connect.