Chapter Basic System Administration
Author: name contact BSD flavour
Reviewer: name contact BSD flavour
Reviewer: Yannick Cadin yannick@diablotin.fr FreeBSD/OpenBSD
An important component of system administration is an awareness of its subsystems and their interactions, as well as how to monitor the health of a running system. Demonstrate experience in interacting with BSD processes, a running kernel, and the BSD boot process. Demonstrate familiarity with BSD devices, the disk subsystem and the mail and print daemons.
- Determine which process are consuming the most CPU
- View and send signals to active processes
- Use an rc(8) script to determine if a service is running and start, restart or stop it as required
- View and configure system hardware
- View, load, or unload a kernel module
- Modify a kernel parameter on the fly
- View the status of a software RAID mirror or stripe
- Determine which MTA is being used on the system
- Configure system logging
- Review log files to troubleshoot and monitor system behavior
- Understand basic printer troubleshooting
- Create or modify email aliases for Sendmail or Postfix
- Halt, reboot, or bring the system to single-user mode
- Recognize the difference between hard and soft limits and modify existing resource limits
- Recognize the BSD utilities that shape traffic or control bandwidth
- Recognize common, possibly third-party, server configuration files
- Configure a service to start at boot time
- Configure the scripts that run periodically to perform various system maintenance tasks
- View the Sendmail or Postfix mail queue
- Determine the last system boot time and the workload on the system
- Monitor disk input--output
- Deal with busy devices
- Determine information regarding the operating system
- Understand the advantages of using a BSD license