Greets all, I have just recently become a member of the Linux community and have spent copious amounts of time on How-to Forges forums and how-to guides, along with the ubuntu forums and many other sites. I have installed, screwed up and reinstalled numerous times to learn, and followed many of the how-tos listed on the how-to forge website to learn what can be done using linux. I started from scratch and have learned everything that I do know from the very generous and helpful Linux community. With that said, I have gotten two servers up and running, for the most part doing the things I need/want them to do. I have one machine that does nothing but act as my mail server for multiple domains. Its the how-to: Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL And SquirrelMail (Ubuntu 9.04) on how-to forge website. My second machine is running a LAMP setup with just apache/php/perl/mysql/phpmyadmin etc. And it holds the websites that I need to be served up. Everything works well and I do not have to many problems. My questions are these, and I hope that they are not to obstinate: What are the basic system/network/server administrative duties that I should be preforming to ensure that all systems are healthy and running at peak performance . I prefer to use cli to do my administration. Is this a secure,efficient, and normal way of administration? I want to ensure that I'm looking at the proper log files in the proper way. I look at (mail.log,mail.err,etc..) sys.log, apache's error file for the respective site. What others? And I use vim to view the files. Is that standard practice? I monitor system resources using the top command, and check my disk space for my data-disks using the df -l command? Are there better ways or am I on track. If possible would someone who regularly maintains and administers multiple servers be willing to outline or summarize what there “morning routine” is? How you would start your day off in your roll as a network/system/server administrator? I appreciate all the time and effort of the community at large and all those who put in so much effort and time helping others. Thank you and good day. jdakhayman
My morning route: - Arrive at the office - Turn on monitors - Go to coffee machine - Open mailbox - Check automated mails like: pflogsumm, rkhunter, etc .. - Go to coffee machine - Check the cacti graphs while drinking some fresh java - Check nagios log of last night - Go to coffee machine - Quickly browse to the syslog daemon's logfiles for anomalies (all servers log *.* to 1 syslog server, so i don't have to browse all server log file seperately) - Quickly run through some php error logs and start swearing to co workers when they mssed up code *evil grins* - Move the contents of a random mailbox to a temp dir and wait for a phone call .. (we use imap ) - check new posts on this forum - morning break -> coffee misc: Also Midnight Commander (apt-get install mc) is your friend (just google the terms you don't know ;-))
