2. About this Book

This book is authored and published as an Open Source book. It is written using the reStructuredText markup language and versioned using Git, currently on bitbucket and rendered through sphinx. Additions, corrections and contributions are welcome.

When this book reaches a more mature version, content will probably be moved to github to facilitate quick development and contrinutions by readers and users of this book.

This book will help you learn Linux System Administration using various distributions of Linux. The book will mostly focus on CentOS version 6, 7 and 8,(and thus, by extension also Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Linux, Scientific Linux, others), Debian version 8, 9 and 10 and Ubuntu LTS releases 16.04 and 18.04.

Where applicable, the book will explain the theory behind something, and also document the various methods to configure a specific feature using the commandline or configuration-files and/or various configuration-tools provided by the distribution. Where applicable, the more modern method of configuring things using Configuration Management tooling such as Ansible will also be highlighted.

The book will help you prepare for various certifications and exams like RHCSA or LPI-1 and LPI-2 or an equivalent level of System Administration knowledge usable on any Linux platform and environment.

2.1. Typography and Layout

Where possible, commands that can be typed are formatted as bold

File and directory names will be presented as follows:

filename or /directory/path/

In code-samples and screen views, code-blocks are used, with lines where commands were given highlighted:

$ some-command-here
it's output
$ another command here
more output
and more

In longer examples, or where further text will refer to line-numbers, these can be found in the left margin.

Environment variables are presented as ENV-VAR

2.2. Contributions and Acknowledgements

Todo

Add list of contributors and acknowledgements

Contributions to this book are very welcome, when more of the groundwork has been prepared, the source of this book will be uploaded to a public github repository, and contributions can be made using forks and pull-requests. Welcome contributions include:

  • New chapters for parts that are currently missing

  • Exercises and examples

  • Additions and notes for items that are different on different Linux distributions

  • Fixes and spelling-errors

2.2.1. Images Used

2.3. License

This source and rendered versions of this book are covered under the MIT license, which is included below. The copyright to the content belongs to Mark Janssen, Sig-I/O Automatisering.

Note

MIT License

Copyright © 2018 Sig-I/O Automatisering / Mark Janssen

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.