Linux Admin: Education for the self taught admin

From BEL

1 What is the goal
2 BEL How To's
3 From our personal libraries
4 Downloads
5 Articles and links on the web
6 Books

What is the goal

One of the biggest reasons we are working on the BEL project is to enable small business owners and managers, schools and non-progit agencies to be able to manage their computer systems independently as much as possible. Thereby allowing them to reduce costs that can be used on other things like operating expenses or inventory, etc.

It also "frees" the small business admin by educating them in how their computers and networks functions, giving them the opportunity to make better educated decisions even when contracting out support for their computer systems.

By offering step by step instruction and direction to more in depth, background information here, we can help provide the small business admin with as formidable an arsenal as possible costing only time and self commitment.

On this page, we will provide links to free documentation and online books that anyone can study for free while online. Many of these links are to the O'Reilly "Safari" site, which offers very good books that one can purchase or read the entire text online for free. ( EDIT: This is no longer true. as of approx 10-27-07, Safari has been changed to a subscription service.)

There is no magic method of running a computer server without having to do some amount of homework. Our goal is that between combining as much free education as possible with a server that is as user admin friendly as possible The small business admin can be productive sooner while learning at the same time.

BEL How To's

At this particular point, we would like to say that while we are trying to make installing, configuring and administrating Linux servers and systems easier here, there is a lot more to being a server admin than just getting things set up.

In order to do the job correctly, it really does call for an understanding of writing at least basic scripts and working with the specific configuration files that provide the servers and apps the information they need to do the job and the syntax required to do it correctly.

We encourage you enthusiastically to use these articles to get your systems running and in use, but take the next step and get a book or two that will teach you more about command line tools and config file editing for the specific servers and apps. In the long run, it will make you a better admin and allow you to provide the best service for your users.

We provide a list of top notch books and links below to help get you on your way.

Also, several of these articles refer to PCLOS specifically. Most of that is due to the manner of installing packages, etc.. Once you get beyond that, the rest of the information can be used on pretty much any distro.

Client Side

We realize that if we are going to set up servers, at some point, we will need to configure clients in order to access some of them. In this section we will work to collect and provide How To's to help with configuring the client side configuration for the servers we offer.

App Docs

General Docs

Some docs aren't very specific to a server that is installed on BEL Server Basic. Some docs we provide are just to help users get around and be productive while using the interface and tools we offer.

General Docs

From our personal libraries

Linux Administrator Street Smarts: A Real World Guide to Linux Certification Skills (Paperback) by Roderick W. Smith

Linux Administration: A Beginner's Guide By Steve Shah, Wale Soyinka

Linux: The Complete Reference, Sixth Edition. By Richard Peterson (2008)

The Book of Webmin...or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Unix. By Joe Cooper (2003)

The Linux Networking Cookbook By Carla Schroder (2007)

Downloads

A pretty good in depth tutorial for those wanting more on the command line approach to Linux.

Linux Course Modules

Articles and links on the web

Set It UP This is a BEL extended list of links to distro and app specific Step by Step instructions in Linux

Generic How To's

Encrypting and decrypting files from command line with gpg

Linux Limit CPU Usage Per Process

10 ways of resetting a lost linux root password

Linux Partition Recovery - Tips & Tricks

How to prevent your SSH session from disconnecting in Linux

How to block DDOS attacks in Linux

How to Detect and Prevent Psyb0t, the Linux Router Worm

An online resource for almost all the Linux commands (867 of them). Very easy to search. All commands listed alphabetically.

Directory of Linux Commands

One of the best sources for How To's in the business/enterprise related Linux world is at Linux.com

LDP HOWTO-INDEX

Another good source of HowTo's in the Linux world. This link goes straight to PCLinuxOS related articles.

How To Forge

This article goes a bit into the future of How Linux filesystems can handle extremely large amounts of space. Good to know.

The future is bright for Linux filesystems

Proxy/Filtering This works very handy on a BEL Server as Webmin and Squid are already installed. Only the DansGuardian Webmin module need be installed and maybe ksysv. To use it as a filtered proxy server, make sure you set your browsers on all machines to use this machines IP as a proxy address.

Running a webdav server This is good info for setting up a calendar server.

Carla Schroder has a series on running secured networks. She does reference Ubuntu server a lot, but we won't hold that against her ( Someone send that woman a copy of SBK ):

Run a Business Network on Linux: Intrusion Detection (Part 1)

Run a Business Network on Linux: Intrusion Detection (Part 2)

Run a Business Network on Linux: Intrusion Detection (Part 3)

Run a Business Network on Linux: Intrusion Detection (Part 4)

For more 'in-depth" information on scripting, this is a well written, if not a little dry page (but since when has scripting ever been an exciting topic)

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide An in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting Mendel Cooper

A great site about Linux configuration files and more. A 'must see' for the Linux admin who plans to get their hands dirty.

Understanding Linux configuration files Classifications and usage

Speaking of IBM Linux links, This is a list of ALL of IBM's Linux How To's.

IBM developerWorks:Technical Library

Books

Note:  These links were placed when Safari by O'Reilly was free. since then, Safari has been changed to a  
subscription service, an overpriced one at that.   There is still some useful information that can be gotten from  
the free "previews" they offer, and if nothing else, the texts themselves are still good texts to search for if you  
are looking for books on these topics.

Apache

Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition by Ben Laurie; Peter Laurie

DoveCot

Pro Open Source Mail: Building an Enterprise Mail Solution (Hardcover) by Curtis Smith Not readable online

LDAP

LDAP System Administration by Gerald Carter (2003)

Linux

Linux Cookbook by Carla Schroder (2004)

Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two by Brian K. Jones; William von Hagen (2005)

Building Clustered Linux Systems by Robert W. Lucke (2004)

Linux Network Administrator's Guide, 3rd Edition by Tony Bautts; Terry Dawson; Gregor N. Purdy (2005)

LPI Certification