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Linux Admininstration Resources? 73

Posted by Cliff from the resources-for-the-workplace dept.
shadfc asks: "I'm starting a new job as the system administrator for a small company in Tampa. They currently have 10 Red Hat servers (they are open to distribution change) that have not been actively maintained for a few months. I'm a Junior in College with a decent amount of Linux experience, but this will be my first job in this kind of position and responsibility. I'm asking for resources that can help fill in the holes in my knowledge and help make me a better administrator. Quality books on the subject would be preferred, but any advice is welcome. Thanks!"
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Linux Admininstration Resources? More

Linux Admininstration Resources?

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  • All Linux commands (Score:4, Informative)

    by prostoalex ( 308614 ) * on Monday May 24, 2004 @07:17PM (#9242815) Homepage Journal
    O'Reilly publishing has listing of all Linux commands [linuxdevcenter.com], at least those that are expected to behave in a conformist way from distro to distro.
  • Try the "Practical Guide" series by Mark Sobell; the homepage is here [sobell.com].

  • You better patch them first (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SpaFF ( 18764 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @07:22PM (#9242858) Homepage
    They currently have 10 Red Hat servers (they are open to distribution change) that have not been actively maintained for a few months.

    Can you give us the IP addresses of these machines?

    Seriously though, make sure those babies are patched and secure before you worry about learning anything.

    • Can you give us the IP addresses of these machines?

      127.0.0.1/8


      I'd recommend installing gentoo. It will take you some serious effort, but once you make it through it will seem easier the 2nd time. Install it about 4 or 5 times, and you will know a lot about linux. Then move on to another distro that doesn't take 3 days to compile the window manager like mandrake or debian (my personal favs in that order).

      be warned however that you will get very frustrated if you try the gentoo thing. It will teach

      • Re:You better patch them first (Score:5, Insightful)

        by j-turkey ( 187775 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @09:14PM (#9243469) Homepage
        I'd recommend installing gentoo.

        Without getting into a flame war (I won't reply to flames) -- I'd suggest thinking long and hard about installing Gentoo on 10 machines running an existing environment. By all means, install it on your home computer(s). It's quite flexible and is perhaps one of the coolest Linux distros that I've ever worked with.

        Presumably, these Linux boxes are actually doing something useful, and they're important to the company that you're working for. I also presume that you'll be leaving the company in 18 months when you finish up your undergrad degree. Now, if you move to a semi-obscure distro like Gentoo, you will leave them with Gentoo. How many admins really know the ins and outs of Gentoo as well as they know some of the more popular distributions like RH, SUSE, Debian, etc? They may have a difficult time finding a competent SA to run those Gentoo boxes...they'll curse your name.

        For many (and I'd say that these are the more forward-thinking competent SA's) a large part of systems administration is building an environment that's scalable, easily reproducable, and have everything documented so that he next guy can pick right up where you left off. Building very complex systems from the ground up is very cool...but IMO, is probably best for larger companies with money to toss into a proper staff. I always saw one of Gentoo's strongest points as being an easy way out for large companies who would want to roll their own. Unfortunately, you are one guy -- with ten systems (and I don't know how many users). Best bet for someone like you? Keep it simple.

        I would suggest looking into a mainstream Linux distro that will be very easy for you to troubleshoot and maintain (I know that Gentoo is easy to maintain from an update perspective -- don't go there). There are a lot of good distributions out there, and I won't recommend any particular one.

        Next step (and here's where I actually get into answering your question): Learn (bourne) shell scripting. Even if you already know shell scripting, your best bet is to learn how to do it in practical situations -- figure out which tedious tasks you tend to perform regularly and start there. The next step is to apply this knowledge to bigger jobs, that you might only perform once. While you're at shell scripting, regular expressions are of very high importance. Learn them. Finally, a higher-level language (like Perl) is very useful; especially when dealing with strings. In my earlier days of SA work, not knowing Perl was a big hinderance -- no sense writing 50 lines of shellcode when 15 lines of Perl could handle it (and faster taboot).

        Anyway, that should get you started. Good luck at this gig -- and don't blow it. Good SA jobs can be tricky to come by.

        • Gentoo is just as stable as any other distro out there.
        • I'd suggest thinking long and hard about installing Gentoo on 10 machines running an existing environment.

          no no no no never install it on a production environment as a test. Find another machine and install it a few times, on that same machine. Don't format your production machines until you're confident in your skills.
        • > Next step (and here's where I actually get into answering your question):
          > Learn (bourne) shell scripting.

          I have a different suggestion here. If you were going to be administering a
          bunch of older, proprietary Unix systems, this would be sound advice, for sure.
          However, the OP seems to indicate that everything in question is at least
          somewhat close to modern and open to the concept of upgrades. In that kind
          of environment, you're not likely to run into a crochety old SunOS box that
          can't be upgraded t
          • In fairness, the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide here [tldp.org] is a great resource for people wanting a good reference to bash scripting and shell scripting in general.
            • > In fairness, the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide here is a great resource
              > for people wanting a good reference to bash scripting and shell scripting
              > in general.

              The documentation for bash is good, but the previous poster was talking about
              plain vanilla traditional back-in-the-day-style bourne shell scripting, the
              kind where you don't use any bash-specific features or other non-portable
              stuff. bash is fine if you only have to support Linux systems, cygwin, and
              the modern BSDs maybe, but it's not ubiqu

      • Re:You better patch them first (Score:4, Informative)

        by Zapman ( 2662 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @11:39PM (#9244309)
        Gentoo is a wonderful distribution... It's the only thing recent that I could get to install on my sparc64 box.

        That said, I would never run it in a production environment. It's tendancy to encourage bleeding edge packages WILL come back to bite you at some point.

        RedHat is an excelent choice for production systems, if for no other reason than easily available and proven support contracts. I know that it's 'leet' to be able to look up things in google, but if you get hit by a bus, it will let the company survive while they find your replacement.

        Having a support contract is also wonderful for getting to REAL support. If you're dealing with something really esoteric, you will often be much better off with a support contract. Let them fight to find the answer out of some kernel developer in New Zealand. You have the rest of your job to do too.

        For your desktop box, I would urge you to do at least a gentoo stage 1 build, if not a Linux From Scratch install. These will take you forever to finish, but your knowledge of the linux as an OS will skyrocket. And while you're learning, you won't be affecting the company's bottom line, which ultimately provides you with the paycheck.

        As for books, the armadillo book from ORA is wonderful, as is the 'purple book' (the successor to the highly acclaimed 'red book'. King of unix system admin books). The purple book will run you about $60-70, but reading through it will help you learn a lot.

        Let's see: General notes:

        1) Run postfix rather than sendmail. More secure, and easier to deal with. Less hair loss is to be encouraged.

        2) Ban telnet, and use ssh.

        3) Learn firewalling. Become hyper anal.

        3a) Learn DMZ's. Limit exposure. There are some people who have 1 firewall interface per application (my company is moving that way). It's great for fine grained access control.

        4) You don't and can't know everything. Admit this often. It's part of the key to learning.
        • Gentoo is a wonderful distribution... It's the only thing recent that I could get to install on my sparc64 box. Debian installed just fine, and in about 2/3rds the time it took to install gentoo :-)

          For your desktop box, I would urge you to do at least a gentoo stage 1 build, if not a Linux From Scratch install. These will take you forever to finish, but your knowledge of the linux as an OS will skyrocket.

          Absolutely!

          You don't and can't know everything. Admit this often. It's part of the key to learni
        • I got debian to install fine on my Sun Blade 100. Funny what a little effort and reading can yield you.
          • The install kernel would not boot. I tried the beta installer for test, the default installer for test, and the default installer for stable. None of them would boot. I use debian on i386, so I know how the install works.

            The gentoo install kernel just worked, so I worked with it.

            I'm mostly distribution agnostic. I've played with all the big players. Some are better than others, but the best way is to be able to work with any of them.
            • Did you get any errors? Did your computer catch on fire? If at first you don't suceed, try, try again! All I had to do to get debian to install was toss a compatible kernel and install root from a colleague's webpage (one of the first hits on google for "debian sparc blade 100") onto a TFTP server, and point the blade 100 to boot from the server by a nice old boot net:dhcp.

              http://toolbox.rutgers.edu/~amurphy/fai [rutgers.edu]
      • > I'd recommend installing gentoo.

        Yes, but *not* on the production systems! Install Gentoo on a workstation
        or a spare system or something, for the learning experience, but keep the
        production systems on a less bleeding-edge distribution. Seriously. I like
        Gentoo, but it tends to pick up quite new versions of things before they've
        been hammered on for very long.
  • Ever since I began using Linux on a Day to Day basis I have had this book [amazon.com]( I have 3rd edition though). Some people say you can learn all you need through man pages and Faqs but this book like others in the nutshell series by O'Reilly exposes you to information in a way that you can digest bits and nuggets at your leisure instead of plodding through terse texts or poor examples in larger texts.

  • Not a techincal reference (Score:5, Informative)

    by deque_alpha ( 257777 ) <{qhartman} {at} {gmail.com}> on Monday May 24, 2004 @07:25PM (#9242872) Journal
    but "The Practice of System and Network Administration" is very, very handy. Full of best practices and day-to-day scenarios and how best to handle them. See it here [amazon.com] at Amazon. I have found the advice contained in there to be indispensible as I am maturing as a sysadmin.
    • I'll second this. I have a copy and it doesn't leave my desk. It breaks things down into things that you should do, and then things you can do to make it even better. It gives examples of policies, memo's, forms, everything you could ask for. I've been a sysop for four years now, and it's taught me a lot. One of the other great things is that the two authors have differing approaches, so you don't just get one persons viewpoint.

  • UNIX System Administration Handbook (Score:4, Informative)

    by Aniquel ( 151133 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @07:31PM (#9242906)
    First link on Amazon. Indispensible.

  • LINUX: Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition (Score:3, Informative)

    by Alethes ( 533985 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @07:34PM (#9242933)
    LINUX: Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition [icon.co.za]

    From the Introduction:
    This book covers GNU/LINUX system administration, for popular distributions like RedHat and Debian, as a tutorial for new users and a reference for advanced administrators. It aims to give concise, thorough explanations and practical examples of each aspect of a UNIX system. Anyone who wants a comprehensive text on (what is commercially called) ``LINUX'' need look no further--there is little that is not covered here.
  • (if you're going to switch)

    debian is very nice maintenance and security wise. there's very little like it.
    • And it's a pain to install. If you've never installed it before, trying to get 10 boxen of Debian up when you have to hit the ground running is a nightmare for anyone but an experienced Debian Installer (note I didn't say Debian user -- we all know Debian users install once, then forget what a pain it was because they upgrade forever).

      Debian would work well AFTER he's sure everything else is working and patched and secure (and up to date) and AFTER he's had time to practice installing it on a test box.

  • Linux Administration Handbook (Score:5, Informative)

    by linuxwrangler ( 582055 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @07:38PM (#9242947)
    Check out the "Linux Administration Handbook" by Evi Nemith, Garth Snyder, Trent R. Hein et. al. It's published by Prentice Hall and is a pretty good overview of the tasks you'll be expected to do.

    Also, check out the books in Sybex's Craig Hunt Linux Library series - he doesn't actually write all of them but most are pretty good. (Don't know how O'Reilly let him escape after writing the excellent "TCP/IP Network Administration".)

  • Nemeth (Score:4, Informative)

    by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @07:39PM (#9242952)

    Linux Administration Handbook by Nemeth et al. Her Unix System Administration Handbook is a classic. This one is targetted at Linux. Very nice. Great artwork too.

  • How about... (Score:3, Informative)

    by .@. ( 21735 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @07:40PM (#9242957) Homepage
    Limoncelli and Hogan.
    Evi Nemeth's book.
    Aeleen Frisch's book.
    Mark Burgess' book.

    http://www.sage.org/

    Note that all are active in SAGE.

  • Skip the RPMs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Graelin ( 309958 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @07:44PM (#9242981)
    Before I get modded to oblivion, hear me out.

    Whenever you install software, or perform an update, don't just jump into the RPMs. Build it from scratch on a dev box or something. Get really really familiar with the package. RPMs gloss over a lot of detail that a good sys admin should know or at least have written down somewhere. Aside from the minuta of the package you're bound to learn a thing or two about how to set up a system. Some packages require a lot of security prep-work before they will work. Others will not. After you've seen enough of both worlds you'll understand why they should and how to implement it. Last but not least, all the README files you'll go through will likely teach you some neat tricks that can be applied everywhere.

    Second, embrace your distro. If you're going to stick with RedHat see if you can get up2date working properly. Or with debian, apt-get hourly from a local "approved" package mirror. These things make your life a lot easier if done right.

    Books are fine and good but they're usually out of date. Understanding the system will enable you to handle the changes between the print date of the book and the release date of the software.

    Try to get topic-specific books if you can. It's impossible to cram all aspects of the admin life into a great tomb - even a dozen of them. You'll certainly be lacking detail. Check out Safari (no link, sorry.) They have an enourmous library and their parent company makes some of the best techincal books ever.

    Lastly, KISS. Use a real load balancer, get an SSL accelerator, get a hardware firewall. Yes yes, Linux can do all these things - but you'll spend much more time maintaining it than you would the Cisco box. (If that won't start a flamewar on here, nothing will.)

    And, lest I forget, good luck!

    • Why up2date? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by magefile ( 776388 )
      If you're going to stick with RedHat see if you can get up2date working properly.

      I'm not a sysadmin, I just use my home box (FC1, soon FC2), but in my experience, up2date is a slow, buggy, unreliable piece of crap. Go with yum. Not only is it faster and more stable, but you get more data from it, it allows you to install and uninstall stuff semi-automagically, and you can script it if you want.

      Note: NEVER script upgrades on a production machine. Useful stuff to script would be "yum check-upgrade",
    • Hourly apt-get? Thats a little overkill in my opinion, automated apt-get could be very nasty in some situations such as the broken version of lilo a couple of years back that left many people with unbootable systems, what if libc6 broke? Also most mirrors I've used seem to only update once or twice a day, as a few times I've had to manually grab packages from US mirrors that haven't made it to my local mirror yet (and still haven't a few hours later)

      Personally I have a nightly apt-get update -qq &

      • The key here is an "approved package mirror." Not debian.org but your own apt-cache that you keep track of packages with. The cache reduces network flow and increases control over your system as you allow or remove packages from said cache.

        In theory what you'd want is some sort of "push" tech that forces packages upon the computers. In practice this is hard to implement securely and correctly. So an apt-get cron job will suffice nicely as a hack. Sure, if someone comprimises the apt-cache you're other ten
    • "If that won't start a flamewar on here, nothing will.)"

      Well, I can't totally disagree with you on this, but just a few notes of my own:

      1. If you're an all Linux shop and you're small enough to not have a single CISCO product, addiung one means that the admin needs to learn a totally new environment. If you're bored and mgmt doesn't care, sure go for something new.

      2. Cisco's are easier to setup out of the box. I can't dispute that because Ciscos were desinged from the ground up for their purpose.
      But (the
    • Roll your own RPMs [rpm.org] or debian packages. This give you the benefit of customization plus the benefits of a package manager. Using a package manager really reduces the headaches of documenting what is installed where and what version. If you add sudo to the mix, then you have a good idea of who to ask about the changes as well.

  • Get a "playground" intranet box for experiments. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DocSnyder ( 10755 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @07:46PM (#9242987)
    Especially in enterprise environments, a wrong command or insufficient planning of some critical tasks can have severe side-effects. When I started administration, I installed GNU/Linux onto an old desktop PC which wasn't any longer good enough as a workstation but sufficient as a "playground" box. System upgrades, new kernel releases, complex shell scripts and even MTA or WWW server settings can be tested without disturbing other people's work. Internet access is only necessary as far as a HTTP proxy is concerned, to get updates.

  • Know your resources (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mnmn ( 145599 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @07:53PM (#9243037) Homepage
    When I was learning Linux, I visited the Guides and HOWTOs every 5 minutes. www.linuxdoc.org and click on the sysadmin guide, networking guide etc.

    To learn Linux itself, do a very basic install of a simple distro like slackware, or just a basic install of redhat on a test box, goto each directory like /etc, /sbin, /usr/sbin and read the man pages of every file you dont understand... for example you run into tune2fs, want to know what the heck is it, so you read the man page.

    After a while you'll get the feel of Linux. You really dont have to know each command or how to use it.. man pages are available everywhere.

    Try to compile your own kernel. That in itself teaches you alot about Linux and its capabilities. Beside that its the tools you have to know, such as apache, php, mysql, samba, nfs, ftpd, nmap, snort, sendmail/qmail/exim/postfix etc. Know the HOWTOs, guides, and man pages and youll never really need to buy books.

    Any major problem you run into has already been fixed in the newsgroups. Goto groups.google.ca, and find your problem. Remember not to run Beta versions of services on your server for now... I'd even stay away from the 2.6 kernels until youve really tested the hardware on your side and are sure of it.
    • i know this may come out sounding like a gentoo zealot troll, but its not. gentoo is an excellent way to learn the guts of your linux system, even if you dont use it for your servers, install it on an extra box and you will garunteed learn a great deal. even just reading the thourough install docs will help. plus gentoo makes updateing and compiling from scratch as well as distribution of selfcompiled binaries a sinch. i highley recomend it.

  • BOFH (Score:4, Informative)

    by arcanumas ( 646807 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @07:55PM (#9243040) Homepage
    All you need is BOFH [ntk.net]
    Read up on the true professionals
  • http://www.tldp.org/ I learned alot about stuff there reading the admin guides and how to's. :) good luck.
  • If you have to ask for advice on /. , your company has obviously hired the wrong guy.
    • or it is a small company/on campus center wanting to give someone a chance.
    • Likewise, if you don't know when to start asking for help, you're probably the wrong guy as well.

      Asking on slashdot is setting up a usable resource for finding many of the other resources you will probably never encounter otherwise. You could search Amazon, BN, and several Linux specific book resources, and never get an idea for how various books actually work out for the people who buy them. Ask on slashdot, and you will find out that author x in the second edition of book y, really couldn't find his ass
      • "I have seen companies "patch everything" because they were using an outdated version of PHP, only to discover that the new version of PHP... "

        Which is why some people actually use Red Hat Linux Enterprise or stuff like that.

        The security fixes to the latest and greatest are backported to the older versions which are supplied by the Distro. So you get version numbers like 3.5p1-11 and so on.

        Some people complain that they don't know whether they are up to date because it's not the latest etc. They don't ge
    • What kind of questions should you ask on Slashdot?

      Questions about...
      Exercise?
      Mental Health?
      Social Skills?
      Hygene?
      Dating?
      Financial Planning?
      Sports?

      Frankly, this is one of the few topics Slashdot can answer.

  • screen (Score:2, Informative)

    by magefile ( 776388 )
    Learn to use screen. It'll let you keep a "virtual terminal" open from day to day without leaving the physical terminal at all unlocked, you'll be able to transfer the virtual terminal home (or from one computer to another) very easily, and it allows for easy logging, which you'll definitely want (hmm, what was it I did yesterday that made the box crash?).

    It's easy to use, and it comes installed by default in most (all?) distros I've ever seen.

  • Ideal solution! (Score:4, Funny)

    by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) ( 613870 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @08:24PM (#9243215) Journal
    I'm asking for resources that can help fill in the holes in my knowledge
    Every time a hole comes up you can post your question to askslashdot. Hordes of geeks, eager to demonstrate their manhood, will answer your question for you. Best of all: it's free, yet you're the one who gets paid for your job.

  • To start (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Beaker1 ( 624539 )
    http://www.google.com is your best friend

    Nothing get's debuged on a production system. If it doesn't work it gets pulled off and fixed in the development environment.

    Take root away from everybody and never give it out. Everyone has to learn this the hard way. Maybe you won't have to.

    Standardize your OS installations and push back on mass customization. The users complain, but in the end they're more appreciative of a consistent working environment, then anything else.

    Following these guidelines

  • Get "Linux In A Nutshell" [oreilly.com]. Every Linux admin should have a copy of this wonderful book around. It is a great refernce book that has helped me numerous times when I forget soemthing or wanted to view more info on a certain command but didn't want to wade through the man pages. There is also sections on bash, rpm, and other things you may find useful. For the most part with regards to security just keep all software installed up2date and don't run unneeded services. And don't forget to check the logs and
  • Backup important stuff.

    Download all the rpms for the RH versions they are using from update.redhat.com into a directory for each version.

    Then move the conflicting versions of RPMs elsewhere (sometimes there are multiple versions of the same package conflicting - move the older version elsewhere). Then do:

    date >> rpm.log
    rpm -Fvh *.rpm >> rpm.log 2>&1 &
    tail -f rpm.log

    Any errors, you have the rpm.log and fix em.
  • For once in my life, spam was useful. There was a book being advertised called the Universal Command Guide that has helped me when I knew how to do something in one OS, but not another (in my case, Linux to AIX). It does not have everything, however it will help you in a jam when you forget how to create a new logical volume or something similar.
  • Another book I highly recommend is Essential System Administration by Aeleen Frisch (O'Reilly).

    Btw, this and the other books listed in replies are on Canonical Tomes [canonicaltomes.org] in the System Administration section [canonicaltomes.org] which is confirmation that they are highly thought of.

  • Red Hat puts up a good set of manuals [redhat.com] on their site.

    This is a subset of what you will need to know, but it's very useful to know how to do things "The Red Hat Way". I would *discourage* trying to immediately do everything manually (like, say, modifying your initscripts to directly start up dhcpcd or something similar). You'll get a bunch of configuration that doesn't play nicely or auto-upgrade cleanly to new versions. It's much easier to have things set up properly, and be able to examine a working sys

  • I was in a similar situation about 4 years ago! When I had not even started college.

    I would firstly forget about the distro switch, this change is something too complicated for a start, especially if you are not used to those particular servers.

    You should learn the internals of services running on the machines. Get a spare machine, install the same Red Hat release running on those servers and install the same services. Now try to make them work the same way they are on the servers. This is a shot in t

  • I'm a redhat man. I've used debian, used to be a slackware zealot.

    Then I built three boxes from source, by hand. LinuxFromScratch.org is a book + source code. It's like buying a kit plane, but you get instructions to make the tools too.

    Building my third box, I realized I had to start over again because of the lack of package management, so I built it using checkinstall ( google it ). The result? A redhat box. I just use Fedora/Workstation now, but....

    You learn so much from the LFS, and more importa
  • If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

    So don't go trying to switch distros on them, or install a different mail transport, or whatever. They may be in need of security updates and you should start rolling those out, a few/day until you catch up. But evidently what they have is working, so don't fsck with it unless you discover a problem. That approach may not be very "proactive", but until you've got some real-world experience in running someone else's shop, it's best to err on the side of conservatism. And

  • If you really want to learn about administration, go look for somewhere else to work, preferably someplace with a senior admin that knows what he's doing and will be able to show you the ropes. It's a lot easier to learn the Right Way to do things when you can watch somebody else do them than when you're frantically running around trying to figure out how to bring a mission-critical server (and to every user, their server is) back up.

    Not to knock your intelligence but your little bit of Unix experience i
  • fanout [stearns.org] is a handy app for passing the same exact identical command to multiple servers at once. Since you're running 10 servers with the same distro, this seems like it would be handy for you at times. (updating etc)

    Get one (preferably two) test systems and install and prep them as if they were the machines you were using. Hell, get one of those 10 servers and make a backup of it and restore it to your test systems.

    Essential System Administration by O'Reilly is pretty good (although it covers a lot of groun

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