Advanced Linux System Administration on Red Hat

Links from the class materials and other supplemental information, grouped by chapter:

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Logical Volume Management

Links from the text:

• documentation about LVM
• The LVM2 Resource page
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 System Administration Guide LVM chapter
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 System Administration Guide LVM Configuration chapter
• data on snapshots
• more about why to consider making a physical volume be the whole disk

Chapter 3: Software RAID

Links from the text:

• additional information about software RAID on Linux
• The original RAID paper
• RAID levels
• raidtools
• SourceForge
• raidmonitor
• FreshMeat
• SATA controllers that cannot handle hotplug
• instructions for swapping a disk

Chapter 4: Performance monitoring

Links from the text:

• A good overall Linux performance site
• The Red Hat manual chapter on resource monitoring
• ATOP System and Process Monitor
• gkrellm
• Nagios
• MRTG

Additional links, not from the course text, or, software needed for the chapter:

iostat and sar are in the sysstat package on the distribution media.

eater (right click and "save link as")
gkrellm rpm

Chapter 5: Kernel tuning

Links from the text:

• IBM's Linux Performance Team
• A Red Hat employee's guide to tuning
• /proc/sys/ values
• Kerneltrap.org
• A good source of benchmarks
• bonnie
• lmbench
• Linux benchmarking HOWTO
• Large page support in the Linux kernel by corbet
• Practical, transparent operating system support for superpages by Juan Navarro, Sitaram Iyer, Peter Druschel, and Alan Cox
• libhugetlbfs
• The IPC parameter recommendations for Oracle
• Linux: Tuning The Kernel With A Genetic Algorithm

Additional links, not from the course text, or, software needed for the chapter:

lmbench-3.0-0.a7.1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
lmbench-2.0.3.tgz (source)

Chapter 6: Disk and filesystem tuning

Links from the text:

• Bonnie
• Bonnie++
• IOzone
• Oracle ORION
• Choosing an I/O Scheduler for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and the 2.6 Kernel by D. John Shakshober
• The disk scheduler recommendations for Oracle
• Boost application performance using asynchronous I/O
• Linux Hardware RAID Howto

Additional links, not from the course text, or, software needed for the chapter:

• bonnie++-1.03-1.a.2.el5.rf.i386.rpm
• bonnie++-1.03a.tgz
• bonnie-1.4-0.i386.rpm
• Local copy of Bonnie results from fsbench.netnation.com
• iozone3_283.tar.gz

Chapter 7: Network monitoring, testing, and tuning

Links from the text:

• wireshark home page
• nmap web site
• History of ttcp
• The network parameter recommendations for Oracle
• NFS performance tuning
• Network Appliance NFS recommendations

Additional links, not from the course text, or, software needed for the chapter:

nmap and wireshark (ethereal) are on the distribution media.

ttcp-3.7-1.2.el5.rf.i386.rpm
netcat-0.7.1-1.i386.rpm
bonnie-1.4-0.i386.rpm
bonnie++-1.03-1.a.2.el5.rf.i386.rpm

Chapter 8: Configuring a DHCP server

Links from the text:

• Configuring a DHCP server

Chapter 9: Automating installs with Kickstart

Links from the text:

• Anaconda
• How Kickstart Works
• Kickstart Installations
• How I did it, or "HOWTO Roll your own"
• Kickstart Options
• Boot Redhat RHEL 4 AS from USB Hard Drive
• Booting (Red Hat) Fedora Core 2 Linux off of an USB HDD drive

Chapter 10: PXE boot and install

Links from the text:

• Red Hat's documentation about setting up PXE booting
• PXE Setup
• PXELINUX Documentation

Additional links, not from the course text, or, software needed for the chapter:

Chapter 11: Virtualization with Xen

Links from the text:

• Xen: Frequently Confusing Issues
• TechOverview: An overview of the different technologies in Linux virtualization
• An attempt to explain xen networking
• Xen Users' Manual
• Creating and installing a CentOS 5 domU instance
• Xen tips and tricks
• A program to generate MAC addresses
• Interpreting Error Messages

Chapter 12: Clustering on Red Hat: an Overview

Links from the text:

• conga doesn't run with selinux
• Bugzilla Bug 233621: It's not possible to manage a cluster with system-config-cluster (wrong path to cman_tool in CommandHandler.py)
• Coda file system
• InterMezzo
• Red Hat GFS description
• Red Hat GFS overview manual
• Red Hat cluster suite docs
• Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster File System
• OCFS2
• PolyServe
• Lustre

Chapter 13: The Linux Virtual Server (LVS)

Links from the text:

• LVS HOWTO
• Job Scheduling Algorithms in Linux Virtual Server
• Virtual Server via NAT
• Virtual Server via Direct Routing
• ARP problem in VS/TUN and VS/DR
• Virtual Server via IP Tunneling

Chapter 14: Time synchronization with NTP

Links from the text:

• The official web site for NTP
• The Clock Mini-HOWTO
• pool.ntp.org: public ntp time server for everyone
• current regional pools

Chapter 15: SELinux

Links from the text:

• The NSA's SELinux page
• The SourceForge SELinux Project
• Red Hat's SELinux page
• Tresys' SELinux page
• Filesystem labeling in SELinux
• A collection of SELinux policy tools from Tresys
• Dan Walsh's blog discussing several of the file context tools
• Dan Walsh's blog discussing restorecond
• SETroubleShoot: A User Friendly Tool for Notification and Diagnosis of AVC Denials
• Dan Walsh's blog about setroubleshoot

Additional links, not from the course text, or, software needed for the chapter:

• NSA SELinux web site
• Fedora SELinux information
• Red Hat 4 SELinux documentation

Chapter 16: Disk Quotas

Links from the text:

• Red Hat quota documentation

Chapter 17: Kernel configuration

Links from the text:

• kernel sources

Additional links, not from the course text, or, software needed for the chapter:

linux-2.6.22.1.tar.bz2
linux-2.6.22.1.tar.bz2.sign

Chapter 18: Network Configuration

Links from the text:

• More information about /etc/sysconfig
• More details about the network configuration in /etc/sysconfig
• Information about Ethernet auto-negotiation

Chapter 19: Network services

Links from the text:

• PuTTY
• SecureCRT
• More information about NFS configuration

Chapter 20: Useful sysadmin tools

Links from the text:

• More details about /proc

Additional links, not from the course text, or, software needed for the chapter:

/proc documentation from the 2.4.22 kernel sources
sysctl doumentation

SkillBridge Training

Examples from the class notes (or, all as one file).

Selected Solutions from the class notes (no looking until you have solved the problems!). Note that all solutions are in an appendix of your course book. All solutions in a compressed tar file.

Evaluation form (if needed)