Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linux Sysops Handbook

abarrak.gitbook.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 28 posts

Re: Linux Sysops Handbook

#11

Post by kodah »

It amazes me sometimes how much of a dying breed systems engineers are. When I was coming up as a SWE I worked for a series of systems engineers, so I learned software from a systems engineering perspective and it's been invaluable as distributed systems have gotten bigger and more OS-like.

If you're wanting to dive a little deeper than this guide touches check out:

- https://man7.org/tlpi/ - Really good for understanding how to build applications within a Linux ecosystem.

- https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Kernel-Development-Robert-Love/... - Really good for understanding why Linux is the way it is. The Kernel this book was written on is awful old, but the principles shine through.

Re: Linux Sysops Handbook

#15

Post by anonymousiam »

geocrasher wrote: post #5

This is definitely a quick reference, definitely short, and definitely missing a ton of things. And it's awesome. This is just the thing a new Linux user needs to start understanding the ecosystem.

My first impression as well. You could take some IT grad and give them this handbook and then they would be dangerous, but not very effective.

Back in the day, when I was first exposed to Unix (on Sun3), one of the sysadmins pointed me to the 'man' feature. After a while I figured out that I could do a man -k - to get a list of all the man pages (because the summary for each page includes a '-'). So I did that and printed out the result (lp/lpr). At that time, the total number of man page entries fit on something like half a dozen pages. I spent a few days (part time) reading each one. It was a great way to learn.

My current Linux desktop (Mint) gives the following for man -k - | wc: 2943 26748 200002

That list would fit on 50 printed pages, which is about 10x what it was 37 years ago.

So if you have the patience to read almost 3k man pages, you too can become a Linux expert.

Re: Linux Sysops Handbook

#16

Post by kkirsche »

I was really shocked to see kali Linux, a penetration testing distribution, mentioned on this. I wouldn’t normally include it in handbooks like this as it can be dangerous to encourage daily-driving a distro like that if they don’t fully understand the risks. Maybe I’d recommend ParrotOS instead :/

Re: Linux Sysops Handbook

#18

Post by asicsp »

There's also "UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook" (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/unix-and-linux/97801342...)

For more such resources, I have a list here: https://learnbyexample.github.io/curated_resources/linux_cli...

I have also written CLI one-liner books for grep/sed/awk, currently free for Twosday: https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/oneliners/Twosday

Re: Linux Sysops Handbook

#19

Post by throwaway984393 »

The best "linux sysops handbook" is the manual. Every one of these tools has a lengthy manual; read them in their entirety. Try out the options.

Not sure what commands there are or what they do? Try this out:

  zcat -f /usr/{,share/}man/man[18]/*.[18].gz | grep -A2 "\.SH NAME" | grep -v "^\.\|^$\|^--" | sed 's/\\//g' | sort -u | less
Then read the manual for those tools that interest you. (learn how man, info, less and more work)

The source code is also free. Many of these tools come as part of a package of other tools and libraries. Find out what package the tools come from, find the source code, download it, peruse through it (even if you don't know the language). I guarantee you will find out new things you didn't know about how the system works.

You can also use debugging tools like strace, ltrace, gdb, lsof, etc to find out more about what these tools are doing. The more you understand what it's actually doing, the deeper your knowledge, and the less you need a handbook to tell you what to do.

Another way to play around with commands is to just run a Docker container like docker run --rm -it ubuntu:18.04 and try anything you want in the container. On exit it will be destroyed. To play around with systemd tools, install Vagrant and spin up a mini Linux VM.

Post reply on HN