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Introduction

This manual, the System Administrator's Guide, describes the system administration aspects of using . It is intended for people who know next to nothing about system administration (as in ``what is it?''), but who already master at least the basics of normal usage, which means roughly the material covered by the (as yet unpublished) User's Guide. This manual also doesn't tell you how to install , that is described in the Getting Started document. There is some overlap between all manuals, however, but they all look at things from slightly different angles. See below for more information about manuals.

What, then, is system administration? It is all the things that one has to do to keep a computer system in a useable shape. Things like backing up files (and restoring them if necessary), installing new programs, creating accounts for users (and deleting them when no longer needed), making certain that the filesystem is not corrupted, and so on. If a computer were a house, say, system administration would be called maintenance, and would include cleaning, fixing broken windows, and other such things. System administration is not called maintenance, because that would be too simple. gif

The structure of this manual is such that many of the chapters should be usable independently, so that if you need information about, say, backups, you can read just that chapter. This hopefully makes the book easier to use as a reference manual, and makes it possible to read just a small part when needed, instead of having to read everything. We have tried to create a good index as well, to make it easier to find things. However, this manual is first and foremost a tutorial, and a reference manual only as a lucky coincidence.

This manual is not intended to be used completely by itself. Plenty of the rest of the documentation is also important for system administrators. After all, a system administrator is just a user with special privileges and duties. A very important resource is the man pages, which should always be consulted when a command is not familiar. however.)

While this manual is targeted at , a general principle has been that it should be useful with other based operating systems as well. Unfortunately, since there is so much variance between different versions of in general, and in system administration in particular, there is little hope for us to cover all variants. Even covering all possibilities for is difficult, due to the nature of its development. There is no one official distribution, so different people have different setups, many people have a setup they have built up themselves. When possible, we have tried to point out differences, and explain several alternatives. In order to cater to the hackers and DIY types that form the driving force behind development, we have tried to describe how things work, rather than just listing ``five easy steps'' for each task. This means that there is much information here that is not necessary for everyone, but those parts are marked as such and can be skipped if you use a preconfigured system. Reading everything will, naturally, increase your understanding of the system and should make using and administering it more pleasant.

Like all other related development, the work was done on a volunteer basis: we did it because we thought it might be fun and/or because we felt it should be done. However, like all volunteer work, there is a limit to how much effort we have been able to spend on this work, and also on how much knowledge and experience we have. This means that the manual is not necessarily as good as it would be if a wizard had been paid handsomely to write it and had spent a few years to perfect it. We think, of course, that it is pretty nice, but be warned. Also, on the general principle that no single source of information is enough, we have compiled a short bibliography of books, magazines, and papers related to system administration.

One particular point where we have cut corners and reduced our workload is that we have not covered very thoroughly many things that are already well documented in other freely available manuals. This applies especially to program specific documentation, such as all the details of using mkfs(8) ; we only describe the purpose of the program, and as much of its usage as is necessary for the purposes of this manual. For further information, we refer the gentle reader to these other manuals. Usually, all of the referred to documentation is part of the full documentation set.

While we have tried to make this manual as good as possible, we would really like to hear from you if you have any ideas on how to make it better. Bad language, factual errors, ideas for new areas to cover, rewritten sections, information about how various versions do things, we are interested in all of it. The maintainer of the manual is Lars Wirzenius. You can contact him via electronic mail with the Internet domain address lars.wirzenius@helsinki.fi, or by traditional paper mail using the address

Lars Wirzenius / Linux docs
Hernesaarentie 15 A 2
00150 Helsinki
Finland

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next up previous contents
Next: The Documentation Project Up: System Administrator's Guide Previous: Introduction to the



Ross Biro
Mon May 22 09:14:56 PDT 1995