This manual, the Linux System Administrators' Guide, describes the system administration aspects of using Linux. It is intended for people who know next to nothing about system administration (as in ``what is it?''), but who have already mastered at least the basics of normal usage, which means roughly the material covered by the Linux Users' Guide. This manual also doesn't tell you how to install Linux; that is described in the Installation and Getting Started document. There is some overlap between all the Linux Documentation Project manuals, but they all look at things from slightly different angles. See below for more information about Linux manuals.
What, then, is system administration? It is all the things
that one has to do to keep a computer system in a useable
shape. Things like backing up files (and restoring them if
necessary), installing new programs, creating accounts for
users (and deleting them when no longer needed), making
certain that the filesystem is not corrupted, and so on. If a
computer were, say, a house, system administration would be
called maintenance, and would include cleaning, fixing broken
windows, and other such things. System administration is not
called maintenance, because that would be too simple.
The structure of this manual is such that many of the chapters
should be usable independently, so that if you need
information about, say, backups, you can read just that
chapter.
This hopefully makes the book easier to use as a
reference manual, and makes it possible to read just a small
part when needed, instead of having to read everything.
However, this manual is first and foremost a
tutorial, and a reference manual only as a lucky coincidence.
This manual is not intended to be used completely by itself. Plenty of the rest of the Linux documentation is also important for system administrators. After all, a system administrator is just a user with special privileges and duties. A very important resource is the man pages, which should always be consulted when a command is not familiar.
While this manual is targeted at Linux, a general principle has been that it should be useful with other UNIX based operating systems as well. Unfortunately, since there is so much variance between different versions of UNIX in general, and in system administration in particular, there is little hope to cover all variants. Even covering all possibilities for Linux is difficult, due to the nature of its development. There is no one official Linux distribution, so different people have different setups, many people have a setup they have built up themselves. When possible, I have tried to point out differences, and explain several alternatives. In order to cater to the hackers and DIY types that form the driving force behind Linux development, I have tried to describe how things work, rather than just listing ``five easy steps'' for each task. This means that there is much information here that is not necessary for everyone, but those parts are marked as such and can be skipped if you use a preconfigured system. Reading everything will, naturally, increase your understanding of the system and should make using and administering it more pleasant.
Like all other Linux related development, the work was done on a volunteer basis: I did it because I thought it might be fun and because I felt it should be done. However, like all volunteer work, there is a limit to how much effort I have been able to spend, and also on how much knowledge and experience I have. This means that the manual is not necessarily as good as it would be if a wizard had been paid handsomely to write it and had spent a few years to perfect it. I think, of course, that it is pretty nice, but be warned.
One particular point where I have cut corners is that I have not covered very thoroughly many things that are already well documented in other freely available manuals. This applies especially to program specific documentation, such as all the details of using mkfs(8). I only describe the purpose of the program, and as much of its usage as is necessary for the purposes of this manual. For further information, I refer the gentle reader to these other manuals. Usually, all of the referred to documentation is part of the full Linux documentation set.
While I have tried to make this manual as good as possible, I would really like to hear from you if you have any ideas on how to make it better. Bad language, factual errors, ideas for new areas to cover, rewritten sections, information about how various UNIX versions do things, I am interested in all of it. You can contact me via electronic mail with the Internet domain address lars.wirzenius@helsinki.fi, or by traditional paper mail using the address
Lars Wirzenius / Linux docs
Hernesaarentie 15 A 2
00150 Helsinki
Finland
Many people have helped me with this book, directly or indirectly. I would like to especially thank Matt Welsh for inspiration and LDP leadership, Andy Oram for igniting an almost dead spark again with much-valued feedback, Olaf Kirch for showing me that it can be done, and Adam Richter at Yggdrasil and others for showing me that other people can find it interesting as well.
H. Peter Anvin, Rémy Card, Theodore Ts'o, and Stephen Tweedie have let me borrow their work (and thus make the book look thicker and much more impressive). I am most grateful for this, and very apologetic for the earlier versions that sometimes lacked proper attribution. Stephen Tweedie also let me borrow his comparison of the xia and ext2 filesystems, but that has since been dropped, since xia is no longer very popular.
In addition, I would like to thank Mark Komarinski for sending his material in 1993 and the many system administration columns in Linux Journal. They are quite informative.
Thanks to Erik Troan at Red Hat, for promising to make a
plain text version of this book available.
A minor accusation goes to Linus Torvalds for writing the damn system to write about in the first place. That applies for the rest of /usr/src/linux/CREDITS as well. Be ashamed, be ver ashamed.
Many useful comments have been sent by a large number of people. My miniature black hole of an archive doesn't let me find all their names, but some of them are in alphabetical order: Paul Caprioli, Ales Cepek, Marie-France Declerfayt, Olaf Flebbe, Helmut Geyer, Larry Greenfield and his father, Stephen Harris, Jyrki Havia, Jim Haynes, York Lam, Timothy Andrew Lister, Jim Lynch, Dan Poirier, Daniel Quinlan, Philippe Steindl. My apologies to anyone I have forgotten.