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Sysadmin Cards Textbook

A free, self-paced textbook in 8 chapters. Read a chapter, then drill it with the 542 companion flashcards using spaced repetition.

8 chapters · 542 cards · Updated

Chapters

  1. 1SSH, Remote Access, and File Transfer

    The Secure Shell (SSH) is the workhorse for remote Linux administration, and almost every aspect of it can be customized. The per-user ~/.ssh/config file lets administrators define...

  2. 2DNS and Name Resolution

    DNS is the addressing layer of the internet, and Linux administrators must understand its record types. An A record maps a domain to an IPv4 address, AAAA to IPv6, and CNAME create...

  3. 3Systemd, Logging, and Scheduled Tasks

    Modern Linux distributions manage services through systemd, and a small set of systemctl verbs covers most needs. systemctl start, stop, and restart control running state, while re...

  4. 4Users, Permissions, and Linux Security

    User account information is split across three traditional files: /etc/passwd (usernames, UIDs, GIDs, home, shell), /etc/shadow (password hashes and aging, readable only by root),...

  5. 5Storage, Filesystems, and LVM

    Linux exposes block devices through a virtual filesystem populated by udev, the kernel's device manager that creates entries under /dev dynamically as hardware appears and disappea...

  6. 6Networking, Firewalls, and Diagnostics

    Modern Linux networking is configured with the ip family of commands. ip addr shows interfaces with their addresses and state; ip addr add IP/PREFIX dev IFACE assigns one, ip addr...

  7. 7Web Servers, SSL/TLS, and Hosting Panels

    The two leading open-source web servers on Linux are nginx and Apache. nginx configuration lives in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf with site definitions under sites-available/ and sites-ena...

  8. 8Process Management, Performance, and Containers

    Process inspection starts with ps (for example, ps aux --sort=-%mem for top memory users and ps -ejH for hierarchy) and pstree -p for a tree view. pgrep returns PIDs matching a nam...

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