On 10-10-02 05:31 PM, Leon Towns-von Stauber wrote: > > On Oct 2, 2010, at 4:01 PM, Rob Cherry wrote: > >> I fear that my days of Solaris bigotry are very outdated. I can ignore the >> Linux world no longer. I can also no longer assume that knowing Solaris is >> enough to fake it for enterprise Linux environments. As such I wanted to >> ask all the linux admins out there 2 questions - >> >> - What admin task did you do in the last week that you consider a linux >> specific thing? i.e. editing the password file doesnt count, dealing with >> ReiserFS does.... > > Packaged software installation usually uses different tools, so get > used to RPM, YUM, etc., depending on the distro.
Absolutely! The two largest families out there are rpm (RedHat, Suse) based and deb (Debian, Ubuntu) based. For RPMs, you need to learn about the commands "rpm", and "yum" (only present on newer versions). For DEBs, learn about "dpkg", "apt-get", "apt-cache", and optionally look at "synaptic" and its friends. Look into: "sync", it behaves differently, /etc/modules /etc/modprobe.d /etc/sysctl.conf the "sysctl" command /etc/security/limits.conf the "dmidecode" command the "lsb_release" command CUPS The kernel parameters: http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt those are parameters you pass to the kernel from your boot loaders, for example to be able to boot in single user mode, disable acpi or force the console to a specific mode. I have a few quick notes on how to use them in gurb and lilo at: http://www.sollers.ca/blog/2007/GA-M57SLI-S4_hangs_on_boot/ But look more into details for whichever boot loader / distro you use, make sure you can bring up a box in single user mode at 3h00 am :-) NFS, both the client and the server needs to be tuned (I wish I could tell you more about this, but I am still playing with this - check a recent thread on the subject on the tech mailing list). >> - Linux War stories, What was the worst linux disaster you have had that I >> should read up on to make sure I could fix it if hit with it in future. >> Dont have to go into much detail as these can get long, but a general >> pointer to give me some reading homework would be ideal. > > IME, filesystem corruption. ext* can corrupt itself in ways I've > never seen on other UNIX systems. It doesn't help that Linux is > often running on commodity-level hardware. It's not a bad idea to > familiarize yourself with ext2/3 and other filesystems, as well as > Linux RAID and LVM software. Yes, and not just the filesystem, the LVM gets corrupted too. If you have a choice of filesystem, read and experiment. Understand how the journal works on ext3 and ext4 (the default might surprise you). Do seriously consider alternative filesystems (XFS, JFS). Personally the biggest problem I run into with Linux distros is being caught between a brand new piece of hardware the needs the latest version of the distro to install easily (you typically can always install, but it often takes more work than it should), and the software vendor which will most of the time only support older versions of the distro. I personally hate gurb, but that's probably an issue with me more than with grub. -- Yves. http://www.SollerS.ca/ http://images.SollerS.ca/ xmpp:[email protected] _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
