The Linux System Administrators' Guide
The Linux System Administrators' Guide
The Linux System Administrator's Guide
Version 0.9
About This Book
1. Acknowledgments
1.1. Joanna's acknowledgments
1.2. Stephen's acknowledgments
1.3. Alex's Acknowledgments
2. Revision History
3. Source and pre-formatted versions available
4. Typographical Conventions
Chapter 1. Introduction
1.1. Linux or GNU/Linux, that is the question.
1.2. Trademarks
Chapter 2. Overview of a Linux System
2.1. Various parts of an operating system
2.2. Important parts of the kernel
2.3. Major services in a UNIX system
2.3.1. init
2.3.2. Logins from terminals
2.3.5. Graphical user interface
2.3.6. Networking
2.3.7. Network logins
2.3.8. Network file systems
2.3.9. Mail
2.3.10. Printing
2.3.11. The filesystem layout
Chapter 3. Overview of the Directory Tree
3.1. Background
3.2. The root filesystem
3.3. The /etc directory
3.4. The /dev directory
3.5. The /usr filesystem.
3.6. The /var filesystem
3.7. The /proc filesystem
Chapter 4. Hardware, Devices, and Tools
4.1. Hardware Utilities
4.1.1. The MAKEDEV Script
4.1.2. The mknod command
4.1.3. The lspci command
4.1.4. The lsdev command
4.1.5. The lsusb command
4.1.6. The lsraid command
4.1.7. The hdparm command
4.1.8. More Hardware Resources
4.2. Kernel Modules
4.2.1. lsmod
4.2.2. insmod
4.2.3. depmod
4.2.4. rmmod
4.2.5. modprobe
Chapter 5. Using Disks and Other Storage Media
5.1. Two kinds of devices
5.2. Hard disks
5.3. Storage Area Networks - Draft
5.4. Network Attached Storage - Draft
5.4.1. NFS
5.4.2. CIFS
5.5. Floppies
5.6. CD-ROMs
5.7. Tapes
5.8. Formatting
5.9. Partitions
5.9.1. The MBR, boot sectors and partition table
5.9.2. Extended and logical partitions
5.9.3. Partition types
5.9.4. Partitioning a hard disk
5.9.5. Device files and partitions
5.10. Filesystems
5.10.1. What are filesystems?
5.10.2. Filesystems galore
5.10.3. Which filesystem should be used?
5.10.4. Creating a filesystem
5.10.5. Filesystem block size
5.10.6. Filesystem comparison
5.10.7. Mounting and unmounting
5.10.10. Checking for disk errors with badblocks
5.10.11. Fighting fragmentation?
5.10.12. Other tools for all filesystems
5.10.13. Other tools for the ext2/ext3 filesystem
5.11. Disks without filesystems
5.12. Allocating disk space
5.12.1. Partitioning schemes
5.12.2. Logical Volume Manager (LVM)
5.12.3. Space requirements
5.12.4. Examples of hard disk allocation
5.12.5. Adding more disk space for Linux
5.12.6. Tips for saving disk space
Chapter 6. Memory Management
6.1. What is virtual memory?
6.2. Creating a swap space
6.3. Using a swap space
6.4. Sharing swap spaces with other operating systems
6.5. Allocating swap space
6.6. The buffer cache
Chapter 7. System Monitoring
7.1. System Resources
7.1.1. The top command.
7.1.2. The iostat command.
7.1.3. The ps command
7.1.4. The vmstat command
7.1.5. The lsof command
7.1.6. Finding More Utilities
7.2. Filesystem Usage
7.2.1. The df command
7.2.2. The du command
7.2.3. Quotas
7.3. Monitoring Users
7.3.1. The who command
7.3.2. The ps command -again!
7.3.3. The w command
7.3.4. The skill command
7.3.5. nice and renice
Chapter 8. Boots And Shutdowns
8.1. An overview of boots and shutdowns
8.2. The boot process in closer look
8.2.1. A Word About Bootloaders
8.3. More about shutdowns
8.4. Rebooting
8.5. Single user mode
8.6. Emergency boot floppies
Chapter 9. init
9.5. Booting in single user mode
Chapter 10. Logging In And Out
10.1. Logins via terminals
10.2. Logins via the network
10.3. What login does
10.4. X and xdm
10.5. Access control
10.6. Shell startup
Chapter 11. Managing user accounts
11.1. What's an account?
11.2. Creating a user
11.2.2. Picking numeric user and group ids
11.2.3. Initial environment: /etc/skel
11.2.4. Creating a user by hand
11.3. Changing user properties
11.4. Removing a user
11.5. Disabling a user temporarily
Chapter 12. Backups
12.1. On the importance of being backed up
12.2. Selecting the backup medium
12.3. Selecting the backup tool
12.4. Simple backups
12.4.1. Making backups with tar
12.4.2. Restoring files with tar
12.5. Multilevel backups
12.6. What to back up
12.7. Compressed backups
Chapter 13. Task Automation --To Be Added
Chapter 14. Keeping Time
14.1. The concept of localtime
14.2. The hardware and software clocks
14.3. Showing and setting time
14.4. When the clock is wrong
14.5. NTP - Network Time Protocol
14.6. Basic NTP configuration
14.7. NTP Toolkit
14.8. Some known NTP servers
14.9. NTP Links
Chapter 15. System Logs --To Be Added
Chapter 16. System Updates --To Be Added
Chapter 17. The Linux Kernel Source
Chapter 18. Finding Help
18.1. Newsgroups and Mailing Lists
18.1.1. Finding The Right Forum
18.1.2. Before You Post
18.1.3. Writing Your Post
18.1.4. Formatting Your Post
18.1.5. Follow Up
18.1.6. More Information
18.2. IRC
18.2.1. Colours
18.2.2. Be Polite
18.2.3. Type Properly, in English
18.2.4. Port scanning
18.2.5. Keep it in the Channel
18.2.6. Stay On Topic
18.2.7. CTCPs
18.2.8. Hacking, Cracking, Phreaking, Warezing
18.2.9. Round Up
18.2.10. Further Reading
Appendix A. GNU Free Documentation License
A.1. PREAMBLE
A.2. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
A.3. VERBATIM COPYING
A.4. COPYING IN QUANTITY
A.5. MODIFICATIONS
A.6. COMBINING DOCUMENTS
A.7. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS
A.8. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS
A.9. TRANSLATION
A.10. TERMINATION
Glossary (DRAFT, but not for long hopefully)
Index-Draft
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