Linux System Administration

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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 ...