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The Linux System Administrator's Guide

Version 0.7

Lars Wirzenius

liw@iki.fi

Joanna Oja

viu@iki.fi

Stephen Stafford

stephen@clothcat.demon.co.uk

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

Table of Contents

Source and pre-formatted versions available

1. Introduction

2. About This Book

2.1. Acknowledgements
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

9.1. 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. Time zones
13.2. The hardware and software clocks
13.3. Showing and setting time
13.4. When the clock is wrong

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.

Source and pre-formatted versions available