What are all the important topics that should be covered in System administration ? Kindly list out the topics, and some links that can help me out in reading about it.
When it comes to Perl scripting, i will say the following are important topics ( exclude OOPerl … ) – Pure PERL scripting,
- perl basics ( syntax, control structures )
- all datastructures ( list, hash, nested )
- regular expressions ( all quantifiers, flags, capturing, non capturing .. )
- all built ins ( map, grep, etc.. )
- module writing & usage,
The same way(along with links) can somebody list out the topics that makes a system administration ( i prefer Linux sysadmin ) complete ?
Best Answer
From a high level the basics are security, recovery and security. I say security twice because it encompasses a lot of topics.
Additionally, some of this is context specific.
For example, security contains networking aspects of your machine. Iptables for example. It also encompasses your user administration. Ie. have you disabled root logins?
Security also could technically encompass system maintenance in the sense of are you regularly updating your machine to have the most current patches and fixes. Additionally, have you removed all packages on your system and disabled all services that you are not using and are not required for the server to do its job.
Recovery is more in terms of do you have a backup plan if your server goes down. Your server can go down in two ways broadly speaking. Hardware & software failures. Each are different.
In terms of hardware, are you using raid and also backing up to protect your servers data? Do you have a spare hard drive in case a drive in your raid array goes bad so you can replace it before you lose another? In terms of software, if this is a production server that requires high uptime... are you using a "staging server" to perform updates and "test" things before applying updates/patches to production server.
There is a lot to administration but my thoughts are somewhat biased to web server administration.
Long story short, it is about crossing your t's and dotting your i's.