Beginner's Guide to Linux System Administration

A Linux System Administrator manages the operations such as maintaining proper software, observing them, and even taking care of backup and hardware systems. It is recommended that before reading this article please go through the article What is Linux System Administration. Here we have some basics of Linux System Administration. 

Some Basic Configurations

Set the Hostname: Open terminal and enter the following command in order to change the hostname.  

sudo hostname your_hostname

Replace "your_hostname" with the hostname that you want to keep. 

Setting up the time zone: Move to /usr/share/zoneinfo/your_zone and then link the zone file with /etc/localtime to set the time zone.  

sudo ln -sf Kolkata /etc/localtime

File System and Management

Managing files is the most important task in Linux as all devices, directories, and packages are just a type of file in Linux. 

1. To know about File system read the article File System in Linux. 
2. To learn more about Linux file hierarchy structure you can read the article Linux File System Hierarchy 
3. To get the difference between Linux and Windows File System read the article Windows vs Linux 

Below is the list of some file management commands in Linux:  

You can also read the file management in Linux from the article https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/file-management-in-linux/  

Networking Commands

Networking commands play an important role in system Administration and a good system Administrator must have good hands-on networking commands. Here is a list of such commands that are mostly used for networking in Linux. 

Managing Users and Group in Linux

A system administrator has to manage the users working on the system. Users are the accounts which are logged in to your system or may log in to the system. Each user in Linux has a unique UID to identify the user. All information of the users is stored in /etc/passwd file and all hashed passwords are stored in /etc/shadow file. There are basically 2 types of user in Linux on the basis of their rights to access.  

• Superuser or Administrator
• General users

Each user may or may not be a part of a group which is a collection of users. To learn more about users in Linux go through the article Users in Linux System Administration. Here is a list of commands that are used to manage users. 

To learn more about how to manage users read the article User Management in Linux 

To learn more about how to manage groups read the article Group Management in Linux 

System Diagnostics/Monitor Performance

A System Administrator should be able to diagnose problems in a system and even to monitor the performance of the system so that it may be improved. Here is the list of some useful commands for the same. 

Reading and Analysing Logs

A good system Administrator must have an idea of how to read and manage logs as they give a lot of crucial and required information. 

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Article Tags :

• Linux-Unix
• Linux-system-commands