Chapter 10. System-Level Troubleshooting and Exam Preparation
Remember that 3:00 p.m. panic from Chapter 9, when your storage was failing and networks were timing out? Well, we’re about to dive even deeper into the murky waters of troubleshooting. This chapter tackles the big challenges that can be tough for even experienced administrators to navigate: runaway processes eating all your CPU, memory exhaustion bringing servers to their knees, users mysteriously being unable to access files they own, and systemd services refusing to start for reasons that make absolutely no sense at first glance.
Here’s the thing about system-level troubleshooting: anyone can restart a service or reboot a server (though please don’t be that person who reboots first and asks questions later) but when a production application starts consuming 800% of CPU and you need to figure out why right now, when memory mysteriously disappears and the OOM killer starts randomly terminating processes, or when half your users can’t log in despite having correct passwords, being able to handle it all is what separates the Linux admins who just survive from those who thrive.
This chapter builds directly on the troubleshooting methodology we established in Chapter 9. You already know how to systematically approach problems: identify, theorize, test, plan, implement, verify, and document. Now we’re applying that methodology to some of the most challenging problems you’ll encounter: process issues that cripple system ...
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