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Concise Reference for System Administration on Linux and Windows

By Abhijit Anand Prabhudan, HCE Second Edition

2012 by Abhijit Anand Prabhudan. Some rights reserved.

Trademark Notice: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Red Hat SHADOWMAN logo are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. Fedora and the Infinity design logo are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. Ubuntu is a registered trademark of Canonical Limited. SUSE and OpenSUSE are registered trademarks of Novell Inc. Debian trademark is a registered United States trademark of Software in the Public Interest, Inc. Slackware is a registered trademark of Patrick Volkerding and Slackware Linux, Inc. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Linux is a trademark registered to Linus Torvalds. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Table of contents

Preface 1 Introduction to basic command line navigation across operating systems 2 Windows Desktop System Administration 3 Preventive Measures for Microsoft Windows OS 4 Linux Installation 5 User and Group administration 6 User and group permissions 7 Basics of vi and vim text editor 8 Head and Tail 9 Processes management 10 Use of simple utilities for basic backup and restore 11 Filesystem Indexing process 12 Hardware information and disk management

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13 RAID 14 Logical Volume Manager 15 Package management across Linux distributions 16 Bash shell profile for users 17 Boot process and Initialization 18 Scheduling 19 Basic network configuration management 20 Remote management on Linux 21 Advanced Network configuration management 22 Network File System NFS for File Server 23 Samba file server to share with Windows 24 FTP Server 25 DHCP Server 69 67 65 63 60 57 54 52 50 49 38 36 34

26 Telnet Server 27 Mail server 28 Apache httpd Web Server 29 DNS Server 30 NIS Network Information Service 31 ACL 32 Disk Quota 33 Firewall and NAT with IPtables and MAC with SELinux 34 Basics of Advanced directory services using OpenLDAP Easier LDAP with 389 DS 35 Virtualization with KVM 36 Troubleshooting common issues on Linux 104 102 99 96 94 92 89 83 77 72 71

Preface
This book is written as hands on reference to system administration on Desktops and Servers. With advent of Commodity Servers and Open Source Software, Linux has established itself as reliable and robust server operating system. Linux is equally good on desktop, but lacks support from manufacturers, so it has not became dominant in personal computing. Google Android for smartphones is itself derived from Linux kernel with heavy modifications. Microsoft Windows continues to dominate client personal computers, and most normal users are familiar with it. In this book, my focus is on Microsoft Windows for personal computers and Linux for Servers. In my personal view, Linux is far better than Microsoft Windows on Servers. So I am not going to cover Windows Server operating systems. Besides Microsoft Windows Server OSes are GUI focused like desktop OSes. With Powershell, Microsoft has introduced command line interface back on Windows, but Powershell is complicated and much more complex than Bash shell command line on Linux. Linux is just a kernel and forms basic operating system along with GNU utilities. Various distributions or distros are based on Linux like Ubuntu and Fedora. I will call Red Hat Enterprise Linux as RHEL. Linux distros differ in their purpose and intent. Each distro has its philosophy. Linux and GNU utilities are freely available under General Public License, GPL. GPL is for free and open source software. Most distros revolve around a vibrant community. Open source software makes business sense as Red Hat Inc. has shown. Currently Red Hat Inc. is most commercially successful Linux distro vendor. Now theres cloud computing which is nothing more, but an evolution of client-server architecture. Most of cloud computing infrastructure implemented is powered by Linux. This book can be used to learn and kept as reference for system administration tasks. I assume the readers to have basic knowledge of computer hardware and networking. Windows Server administrators who want to begin Linux will also find this book useful. Use Oracle VirtualBox or VMware VMPlayer to install Windows and Linux as guest OS, to learn system administration before doing anything on a real system. In this book, actual commands to be entered and keyboard shortcuts are given in monospace font. For running Server Daemons, use static ip address. When a Linux command is longer than width of this book, it is expanded into next line using -> so dont type -> when using the commands on actual system. In the chapters explaining the server daemons, vim editor commands are used for navigating and configuring files.

1 Introduction to basic command line navigation across operating systems

Action Change directory List directory Make directory Copy Move Rename Remove Remove directory View content

Bash cd ls mkdir cp mv mv rm rmdir (blank directory) cat

DOS cd dir mkdir copy move ren del deltree type

Powershell set-location get-childitem new-item copy-item move-item rename-item remove-item remove-item get-content