Linux, Network Security, and Solaris Interview Questions
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The Linux System Administrator's Guide, describes the system administration aspects of using Linux. It is intended for people who know next to nothing about system administration (those saying what is it?),
but who have already mastered at least the basics of normal usage. This manual does not tell you how to install Linux; that is described in the Installation and Getting Started document.
System administration covers all the things that you have to do to keep a computer system in usable order.
It includes 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.
The structure of this manual is such that many of the chapters should be usable independently, so if you need information about backups, for example, you can read just that chapter.
However, this manual is first and foremost a tutorial and can be read sequentially or as a whole.
This manual is not intended to be used completely independently. 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.
Very useful resources are the manual pages, which should always be consulted when you are not familiar with a command. If you do not know which command you need, then the apropos command can be used.
Consult its manual page for more details.
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.