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Chapter 1: Requirements for a Linux System Administrator
The skills needed to develop and maintain such distributed systems and applications
are not taught in schools but learned from experience, sometimes bitter and some-
times sweet.
While writing this book we’ve constantly tested the latest distribu-
tions and tools, and we’ll keep up our experimentation after the book
is released. We invite readers to come to the test site we set up for the
book, http://www.centralsoft.org, where we’ll publish updates to exam-
ples, pointers to useful new tools we’ve discovered, and other tips.
About This Book
System administration books used to be fairly predictable. They showed you how to
manage users, filesystems, devices, processes, printers, networks, and so on. They
did not tell you what to do when new problems emerged. If your web site became
popular, you had to learn quickly about proxy servers, different levels of caching,
load balancing, distributed authentication, and other complex issues. If you added a
database, you soon needed to scale it and learn to avoid SQL injection attacks. Over-
night, sites became mission critical, and you needed the ability to make hot backups
on 24 × 7 systems.
If you’ve been through these fire drills, you may have become tired of doing every-
thing the hard way, facing new technical challenges nearly every day with few
sources of help. Technical documentation—whether ...