Practical Linux System Administration

Chapter 8. Maintaining System Health

Maintaining system health is a broad topic that includes preventative maintenance, housekeeping, patching, security tasks, user maintenance, and monitoring and mitigating various types of sprawl. Maintaining the health of your systems is an active task, not a passive one.

Monitoring can help. Automating periodic cleanup of certain areas can help. Automating updates can help, but you must actively watch logs, check space and sprawl, and take care of user maintenance tasks. Many of these tasks require eyes on screens and hands on keyboards. Far fewer system administrators would be required if you could automate every aspect of system health maintenance.

This chapter covers both automated and manual system health maintenance tasks.

Keeping Your System Clutter-Free

Housekeeping is something that no one loves to do. It’s tedious, time-consuming, and can anger users to the point of reporting your behavior to management, which is never a good thing. As long as you comply with corporate policy and don’t apply any of your own, you’ll have material to refer your angry users to. The rules for decluttering a system are the same for any maintenance you do: have a good backup available if you remove a critical file or directory by accident. The following sections detail how to keep your systems clutter-free.

Cleaning the /tmp Directory

The /tmp directory is a shared directory. It’s shared with all users, applications, and system processes. Anyone may write ...