The Linux System Administrator's Guide

Version 0.8

Lars Wirzenius



Joanna Oja



Stephen Stafford



Alex Weeks



2003-12-03

An introduction to system administration of a Linux system for novices.

Legal Notice
Table of Contents
Source and pre-formatted versions available
1. Introduction
2. About This Book
2.1. Acknowledgments
2.2. Typographical Conventions
3. Overview of a Linux System
3.1. Various parts of an operating system
3.2. Important parts of the kernel
3.3. Major services in a UNIX system
4. Overview of the Directory Tree
4.1. Background
4.2. The root filesystem
4.3. The /etc directory
4.4. The /dev directory
4.5. The /usr filesystem
4.6. The /var filesystem
4.7. The /proc filesystem
5. Device Files
5.1. The MAKEDEV Script
5.2. The mknod command
5.3. Device List
6. Using Disks and Other Storage Media
6.1. Two kinds of devices
6.2. Hard disks
6.3. Floppies
6.4. CD-ROMs
6.5. Tapes
6.6. Formatting
6.7. Partitions
6.8. Filesystems
6.9. Disks without filesystems
6.10. Allocating disk space
7. Memory Management
7.1. What is virtual memory?
7.2. Creating a swap space
7.3. Using a swap space
7.4. Sharing swap spaces with other operating systems
7.5. Allocating swap space
7.6. The buffer cache
8. Boots And Shutdowns
8.1. An overview of boots and shutdowns
8.2. The boot process in closer look
8.3. More about shutdowns
8.4. Rebooting
8.5. Single user mode
8.6. Emergency boot floppies
9. init
9.1. init comes first
9.2. Configuring init to start getty: the /etc/inittab file
9.3. Run levels
9.4. Special configuration in /etc/inittab
9.5. Booting in single user mode
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
11. Managing user accounts
11.1. What's an account?
11.2. Creating a user
11.3. Changing user properties
11.4. Removing a user
11.5. Disabling a user temporarily
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
12.5. Multilevel backups
12.6. What to back up
12.7. Compressed backups
13. Keeping Time
13.1. The concept of localtime
13.2. The hardware and software clocks
13.3. Showing and setting time
13.4. When the clock is wrong
13.5. NTP - Network Time Protocol
13.6. Basic NTP configuration
13.7. NTP Toolkit
13.8. Some known NTP servers
13.9. NTP Links
14. Finding Help
14.1. Newsgroups and Mailing Lists
14.2. IRC
A. GNU Free Documentation License
0. PREAMBLE
1. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
2. VERBATIM COPYING
3. COPYING IN QUANTITY
4. MODIFICATIONS
5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS
6. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS
7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS
8. TRANSLATION
9. TERMINATION
10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE
How to use this License for your documents
Glossary (DRAFT, but not for long hopefully)
List of Tables
6-1. Partition types (from the Linux fdisk program).
9-1. Run level numbers
12-1. Efficient backup scheme using many backup levels
List of Figures
3-1. Some of the more important parts of the Linux kernel
4-1. Parts of a Unix directory tree. Dashed lines indicate partition limits.
6-1. A schematic picture of a hard disk.
6-2. A sample hard disk partitioning.
6-3. Three separate filesystems.
6-4. /home and /usr have been mounted.
6-5. Sample output from dumpe2fs
10-1. Logins via terminals: the interaction of init, getty, login, and the shell.
12-1. A sample multilevel backup schedule.
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  Source and pre-formatted versions available