Linux Administration Best Practices Practical solutions to approaching the design and management of Linux systems

404 Pages·2022·3.194 MB·English

by  Scott Alan Miller

Linux Administration
SBL
c
otein
Best Practices t Astu
la x
nP Linux
MrA
illeacdm
rt
Linux is a well-known, open source Unix-family operating system that is the most widely used i
ci
n Administration
OS today. Linux looks set for a bright future for decades to come, but system administration is e
i
ss
rarely studied beyond learning rote tasks or following vendor guidelines. To truly excel at Linux t
r
administration, you need to understand how these systems work and learn to make strategic a
decisions regarding them. t Best Practices
i
o
Linux Administration Best Practices helps you to explore best practices for effi ciently administering n

Linux systems and servers. This Linux book covers a wide variety of topics, from installation and
deployment through to managing permissions, with each topic beginning with an overview of the
key concepts followed by practical examples of best practices and solutions. You'll fi nd out how
to approach system administration, Linux, and IT in general, put technology into proper business
Practical solutions to approaching the design and
context, and rethink your approach to technical decision making. Finally, the book concludes by
helping you to understand best practices for troubleshooting Linux systems and servers that'll management of Linux systems
enable you to grow in your career as well as in any aspect of IT and business.
By the end of this Linux administration book, you'll have gained the knowledge needed to take
your Linux administration skills to the next level.
Things you will learn:
• Find out how to conceptualize the • Understand the reasoning behind
system administrator role system administration best practices
• Understand the key values of risk • Develop out-of-the-box thinking for
assessment in administration everything from reboots to backups
• Apply technical skills to the IT to triage
business context • Prioritize, triage, and plan for disasters
• Discover best practices for working with and recoveries
Linux-specifi c system technologies • Discover the psychology behind
administration duties
Scott Alan Miller
Linux
Administration
Best Practices
Practical solutions to approaching the design and
management of Linux systems
Scott Alan Miller
BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI
Linux Administration Best Practices
Copyright © 2022 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher,
except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the
information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty,
either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing or its dealers and distributors,
will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by
this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies
and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing
cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
Group Product Manager: Rahul Nair
Publishing Product Manager: Rahul Nair
Senior Editor: Shazeen Iqbal
Content Development Editor: Rafiaa Khan
Technical Editor: Arjun Varma
Copy Editor: Safis Editing
Project Coordinator: Shagun Saini
Proofreader: Safis Editing
Indexer: Manju Arasan
Production Designer: Aparna Bhagat
Marketing Coordinator: Hemangi Lotlikar
First published: February 2022
Production reference: 1120122
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
35 Livery Street
Birmingham
B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-80056-879-2
www.packt.com
To my father, who had the wherewithal and foresight to introduce me
to programming and computers at a very young age and taught me to
see technology as a business tool. And to my wife, Dominica, and my
daughters, Liesl and Luciana, for suffering through the writing of a book on
top of all of the normal craziness that life is always throwing at us. My team
makes this all possible.
– Scott Alan Miller
Contributors
About the author
Scott Alan Miller is an information technology and software engineering industry
veteran of 30+ years, with more than a quarter of a century on UNIX and Linux. His
experience has included companies of every size, in every region of the world, in nearly
every industry. Scott has been a technician, lead, manager, educator, consultant, writer,
author, speaker, and mentor. Today, and for more than the last 20 years, Scott has led the
IT consulting team at NTG. He now lives in Nicaragua.
About the reviewer
René Jensen has 21 years of professional experience with UNIX/Linux administration,
both as an employed administrator and, for the last 9 years, as a consultant. His experience
ranges from branches such as medical, banking, tax, and mobile business, to working in
areas such as CI/CD, container deployment, architecting server clusters, daily operations,
and many other areas.
I would like to thank my family for being patient, since my work started as
a hobby and I spend a lot of time going in depth with new challenges.

Table of Contents
Preface
Section 1: Understanding the Role of Linux
System Administrator
1
What Is the Role of a System Administrator?
Where are system Getting family and friends involved 17
administrators in the real world? 4 Start as a generalist and progress
Wearing the administrator and onto a specialist in the System
Administrator field 18
engineering hats 6
Volunteer for non-profits or non-
The difference between the role of
business organizations 18
an administrator and the role of
Self-study 19
an engineer 7
Age does not matter 20
Hats 7
Internships 21
The wonderous variety of the role 12
Introducing the IT Professional 22
Understanding systems in the
business ecosystem 14 The fallacy of success at any cost 25
Learning system administration 16 Summary 25
Build a home lab 16
2
Choosing Your Distribution and Release Model
Understanding Linux in Linux licensing 30
production 28 Key vendors and products 33
Is Linux UNIX? 29
What about BSD? 33
viii Table of Contents
Debian 35 Release model: rapid release 49
Ubuntu 35 Release model: LTS 50
IBM Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 36 Release and support schedule
RHEL alternatives 37 interplay: The overlap 52
Fedora 38 Release model: Rolling 53
OpenSUSE and SLES 38 Why not just update the packages
Digging into distribution history 39 manually 54
Other Linux distributions 40 Choosing the release model for our
workloads 56
The myth of popularity 41
Choosing your distribution 58
Using multiple distributions 42
Do not fear risk 59
Making the choice 43
Summary 60
Releases and support: LTS,
current, and rolling 45
What does support mean? 47
Section 2: Best Practices for Linux
Technologies
3
System Storage Best Practices
Exploring key factors in storage 64 EXT4 77
Cost 64 XFS 77
Durability 65 ZFS 78
Availability 65 BtrFS 79
Performance 66 Clustered file systems 80
Scalability 67 Network filesystems 81
Capacity 68
Getting to know logical volume
Understanding block storage: management (LVM) 84
Local and SAN 68 Whatever happen to partitions 85
Locally attached block storage 69
Utilizing RAID and RAIN 87
Storage Area Networks (SAN) 69
RAID 87
The terrible terminology of SAN 69
RAIN 88
Surveying filesystems and
network filesystems 74
Table of Contents ix
Learning about replicated local General storage architectures 96
storage 90 Simple local storage: The brick 96
DRBD 91 RLS: The ultra-high reliability solution 99
Gluster and CEPH 92 The lab environment: Remote shared
Proprietary and third-party open- standard storage 100
source solutions 93 The giant scale: Remote replicated
Virtualization abstraction of storage 93 storage 101
Storage best practices 103
Analyzing storage architectures
and risk 95 Storage example 104
Summary 109
4
Designing System Deployment Architectures
Virtualization 112 System Design Architecture 136
Type 1 hypervisor 113 Standalone server, aka the snowflake 136
Type 2 hypervisor 113 Simple does not necessarily
Hypervisor types are confusing 115 mean simple 138
VMware ESXi 116 Many to many servers and storage 139
Microsoft Hyper-V 116 Viewing the world as a workload 140
Xen 116 Layered high availability 143
KVM 117 Reliability is relative 144
Is virtualization only for consolidation? 117 Hyperconvergence 145
Best practices in System Design
Containerization 119
Architecture 146
Cloud and VPS 122 Risk assessment and availability needs 147
Virtual Private Servers (VPS) 130 Workload interplay 149
Defining high availability 151
On premises, hosted, and
hybrid hosting 133 Summary 154
Colocation 134
5
Patch Management Strategies
Binary, source, and script Misleading use of source installation 160
software deployments 158
Patching theory and strategies 165
Compiled and interpreted software 158
The risk of delayed patching 166