Introduction Linux system administration encompasses managing the software and hardware of Linux systems, which can be complex, especially for those new to Linux or managing multiple systems. Fortunately, Webmin, a web-based interface, simplifies many of the routine tasks involved in maintaining a healthy Linux system. This article explores how Webmin can be an invaluable tool for beginners and seasoned system administrators alike by providing a straightforward approach to managing Linux configurations through a simple browser interface.

What is DevOps? How does it relate to other ideas and methodologies within software development? Linux Journal Deputy Editor and longtime software developer, Bryan Lunduke isn't entirely sure, so he asks some experts to help him better understand the DevOps phenomenon. The word DevOps confuses me. I'm not even sure confuses me quite does justice to the pain I experience—right in the center of my brain—every time the word is uttered.

Take a tour through the best infrastructure I ever built with stops in architecture, disaster recovery, configuration management, orchestration and security.

How to provide robust monitoring to low-end systems.

Pulseway provides a product of the same name that's built to enable IT personnel and give them the ability to monitor, manage and automate their systems and the tasks or applications that they host. And, the best part is that they can do all of these things anywhere and everywhere, from their pockets. In fact, I wrote about Pulseway once before, so check out that article for an introduction.

This series covers sysadmin basics. The first article explains how to approach alerting and on-call rotations as a sysadmin. In the second article, I discuss how to automate yourself out of a job, and in the third, I explain why and how you should use tickets. The fourth article covers some of the fundamentals of patch management under Linux, and the fifth and final article describes the overall sysadmin career path and the attributes that might make you a "senior sysadmin" instead of a "sysadmin" or "junior sysadmin", along with some tips on how to level up.

It's one thing to give travel advice; it's another to follow it. In past articles, I've written about how to prepare for a vacation or other travel when you're on call. And, I just got back from a vacation where I put some of those ideas into practice, so I thought I'd write a follow-up and give some specifics on what I recommended, what I actually did and how it all worked.

Cron is nice and all, but don't forget about its cousin at. When I first started using Linux, it was like being tossed into the deep end of the UNIX pool. You were expected to use the command line heavily along with all the standard utilities and services that came with your distribution. At lot has changed since then, and nowadays, you can use a standard Linux desktop without ever having to open a terminal or use old UNIX services. Even as a sysadmin, these days, you often are a few layers of abstraction above some of these core services.

Five observations about why your server monitoring still stinks by a monitoring specialist-turned-consultant. Early in my career, I was responsible for managing a large fleet of printers across a large campus. We're talking several hundred networked printers. It often required a 10- or 15-minute walk to get to some of those printers physically, and many were used only sporadically. I didn't always know what was happening until I arrived, so it was anyone's guess as to the problem. Simple paper jam? Driver issue? Printer currently on fire? I found out only after the long walk. Making this even more frustrating for everyone was that, thanks to the infrequent use of some of them, a printer with a problem might go unnoticed for weeks, making itself known only when someone tried to print with it.

Ubuntu changed networking. Embrace the YAML.

Keep track of your system's uptime and downtime with the tuptime tool. Finding your system's uptime is easy if the "beginning" means the last startup; the historical uptime command reports that information. But what happens if by "beginning" you mean the first startup ever of the system? Or the last 365 days? Or the last month?

It's great to treat your infrastructure like cattle—until it comes to troubleshooting.

Puppet, the company that makes automation software for managing systems and delivering software, has introduced Puppet Bolt, an open-source, agentless multiplatform tool for running commands, scripts, tasks and orchestrated workflows on remote Linux and Windows systems.

In today's IT world, staying on top of anything and everything related to the most mission-critical applications or machines is increasingly important. With this need in mind, Pulseway provides a product of the same name built to give IT personnel the ability to monitor, manage and automate these very systems and the tasks or applications that they host. Managing an entire computing ecosystem (consisting of both physical and virtual machines) never should be too difficult a task, and Pulseway has proven that to be the case.