Early system administration required in-depth knowledge of a variety of services on individual systems. Now, the job is increasingly complex and different from one company to the next with an ever-growing list of technologies and third-party services to integrate. How does any one individual stay relevant in systems and services? This practical guide helps anyone in operations—sysadmins, automation engineers, IT professionals, and site reliability engineers—understand the essential concepts of the role today. Collaboration, automation, and the evolution of systems change the fundamentals of operations work. No matter where you are in your journey, this book provides you the information to craft your path to advancing essential system administration skills. Author Jennifer Davis provides examples of modern practices and tools with recommended materials to advance your skills. Topics include: Development and testing: Version control, fundamentals of virtualization and containers, testing, and architecture review Deploying and configuring services: Infrastructure management, networks, security, storage, serverless, and release management Scaling administration: Monitoring and observability, capacity planning, log management and analysis, and security and compliance

Successfully navigate through the ever-changing world of technology and ethics and reconcile system administration principles for separation of duty, account segmentation, administrative groups and data protection. As security breaches become more common, businesses need to protect themselves when facing ethical dilemmas in today’s digital landscape. This book serves as a equitable guideline in helping system administrators, engineers – as well as their managers – on coping with the ethical challenges of technology and security in the modern data center by providing real-life stories, scenarios, and use cases from companies both large and small. You'll examine the problems and challenges that people working with customer data, security and system administration may face in the cyber world and review the boundaries and tools for remaining ethical in an environment where it is so easy to step over a line - intentionally or accidentally. You'll also see how to correctly deal with multiple ethical situations, problems that arise, and their potential consequences, with examples from both classic and DevOps-based environments. Using the appropriate rules of engagement, best policies and practices, and proactive “building/strengthening” behaviors, System Administration Ethics provides the necessary tools to securely run an ethically correct environment. What You'll Learn The concepts of Least Privilege and Need to KnowRequest change approval and conduct change communication Follow "Break Glass" emergency proceduresCode with data breaches, hacking and security violations, and proactively embrace and design for failures Build and gain trust with employees and build the right ethical culture Review what managers can do to improve ethics and protect their employees Who This Book Is ForThis book’s primary audience includes system administrators and information security specialists engaged with the creation, process and administration of security policies and systems. A secondary audience includes company leaders seeking to improve the security, privacy, and behavioral practices.

Provides advice for system administrators on time management, covering such topics as keeping an effective calendar, eliminating time wasters, setting priorities, automating processes, and managing interruptions.

Early system administration required in-depth knowledge of a variety of services on individual systems. Now, the job is increasingly complex and different from one company to the next with an ever-growing list of technologies and third-party services to integrate. How does any one individual stay relevant in systems and services? This practical guide helps anyone in operations-sysadmins, automation engineers, IT professionals, and site reliability engineers-understand the essential concepts of the role today. Collaboration, automation, and the evolution of systems change the fundamentals of operations work. No matter where you are in your journey, this book provides you the information to craft your path to advancing essential system administration skills. Author Jennifer Davis provides examples of modern practices and tools with recommended materials to advance your skills. Topics include: Development and testing: Version control, fundamentals of virtualization and containers, testing, and architecture reviewDeploying and configuring services: Infrastructure management, networks, security, storage, serverless, and release managementScaling administration: Monitoring and observability, capacity planning, log management and analysis, and security and compliance.

With 28 new chapters, the third edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration innovates yet again! Revised with thousands of updates and clarifications based on reader feedback, this new edition also incorporates DevOps strategies even for non-DevOps environments. Whether you use Linux, Unix, or Windows, this new edition describes the essential practices previously handed down only from mentor to protégé. This wonderfully lucid, often funny cornucopia of information introduces beginners to advanced frameworks valuable for their entire career, yet is structured to help even experts through difficult projects. Other books tell you what commands to type. This book teaches you the cross-platform strategies that are timeless! DevOps techniques: Apply DevOps principles to enterprise IT infrastructure, even in environments without developers Game-changing strategies: New ways to deliver results faster with less stress Fleet management: A comprehensive guide to managing your fleet of desktops, laptops, servers and mobile devices Service management: How to design, launch, upgrade and migrate services Measurable improvement: Assess your operational effectiveness; a forty-page, pain-free assessment system you can start using today to raise the quality of all services Design guides: Best practices for networks, data centers, email, storage, monitoring, backups and more Management skills: Organization design, communication, negotiation, ethics, hiring and firing, and more Have you ever had any of these problems? Have you been surprised to discover your backup tapes are blank? Ever spent a year launching a new service only to be told the users hate it? Do you have more incoming support requests than you can handle? Do you spend more time fixing problems than building the next awesome thing? Have you suffered from a botched migration of thousands of users to a new service? Does your company rely on a computer that, if it died, can’t be rebuilt? Is your network a fragile mess that breaks any time you try to improve it? Is there a periodic “hell month” that happens twice a year? Twelve times a year? Do you find out about problems when your users call you to complain? Does your corporate “Change Review Board” terrify you? Does each division of your company have their own broken way of doing things? Do you fear that automation will replace you, or break more than it fixes? Are you underpaid and overworked? No vague “management speak” or empty platitudes. This comprehensive guide provides real solutions that prevent these problems and more!

“As an author, editor, and publisher, I never paid much attention to the competition—except in a few cases. This is one of those cases. The UNIX System Administration Handbook is one of the few books we ever measured ourselves against.” —Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media “This edition is for those whose systems live in the cloud or in virtualized data centers; those whose administrative work largely takes the form of automation and configuration source code; those who collaborate closely with developers, network engineers, compliance officers, and all the other worker bees who inhabit the modern hive.” —Paul Vixie, Internet Hall of Fame-recognized innovator and founder of ISC and Farsight Security “This book is fun and functional as a desktop reference. If you use UNIX and Linux systems, you need this book in your short-reach library. It covers a bit of the systems’ history but doesn’t bloviate. It’s just straight-forward information delivered in a colorful and memorable fashion.” —Jason A. Nunnelley UNIX® and Linux® System Administration Handbook, Fifth Edition, is today’s definitive guide to installing, configuring, and maintaining any UNIX or Linux system, including systems that supply core Internet and cloud infrastructure. Updated for new distributions and cloud environments, this comprehensive guide covers best practices for every facet of system administration, including storage management, network design and administration, security, web hosting, automation, configuration management, performance analysis, virtualization, DNS, security, and the management of IT service organizations. The authors—world-class, hands-on technologists—offer indispensable new coverage of cloud platforms, the DevOps philosophy, continuous deployment, containerization, monitoring, and many other essential topics. Whatever your role in running systems and networks built on UNIX or Linux, this conversational, well-written ¿guide will improve your efficiency and help solve your knottiest problems.

Essential System Administration,3rd Edition is the definitive guide for Unix system administration, covering all the fundamental and essential tasks required to run such divergent Unix systems as AIX, FreeBSD, HP-UX, Linux, Solaris, Tru64 and more. Essential System Administration provides a clear, concise, practical guide to the real-world issues that anyone responsible for a Unix system faces daily.The new edition of this indispensable reference has been fully updated for all the latest operating systems. Even more importantly, it has been extensively revised and expanded to consider the current system administrative topics that administrators need most. Essential System Administration,3rd Edition covers: DHCP, USB devices, the latest automation tools, SNMP and network management, LDAP, PAM, and recent security tools and techniques.Essential System Administration is comprehensive. But what has made this book the guide system administrators turn to over and over again is not just the sheer volume of valuable information it provides, but the clear, useful way the information is presented. It discusses the underlying higher-level concepts, but it also provides the details of the procedures needed to carry them out. It is not organized around the features of the Unix operating system, but around the various facets of a system administrator's job. It describes all the usual administrative tools that Unix provides, but it also shows how to use them intelligently and efficiently.Whether you use a standalone Unix system, routinely provide administrative support for a larger shared system, or just want an understanding of basic administrative functions, Essential System Administration is for you. This comprehensive and invaluable book combines the author's years of practical experience with technical expertise to help you manage Unix systems as productively and painlessly as possible.