Von Hagen William - Linux Server Hacks, 2: Tips & Tools for Connecting, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting

• Jon Fox [ ) is a Linux user and free software advocate. He's been using Linux since 1996.

• Tom Limoncelli has over 15 years of system administration experience and has been teaching workshops on time management at conferences since 2003. Tom has authored Time Management for System Administrators (O'Reilly) and The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison Wesley). Outside of work, Tom has won awards for his activism in gay/bi/lesbian rights and now helps progressive causes to use technology to further their goals.

• Lance Tost has been a Linux user since the 0.98 kernel days, while he earned his B.S. in Computer Science. He has held programming, DBA, and, Unix administration positions. Lance is a Red Hat Certified Engineer as well as a Solaris Certified System Administrator. Lance contributed [ ].

• Brian Warshawsky is an enthusiastic proponent of all things Linux and open source. His main interests include security, wireless networking, and finding new applications for the Linux operating system. By day he is a professional Unix/Linux system administrator, and by night he's a technical writer and avid mountain biker. He lives in Virginia with his soon-to-be wife Jennifer, his loyal dog Max, and his much less loyal cat Jackie. Brian contributed [ ].

• David Brickner is not a Linux server administrator, but as a Gentoo user, he has learned a couple of things about compiling software. David believes Linux will be the dominant desktop operating system in the near future, and to encourage its adoption, he has written Test Driving Linux and Linux Desktop Pocket Guide , both from O'Reilly.

Both authors of this book have been system administrators for a while. When the opportunity to write this book came about, we initially focused on cool hacks we'd developed or used in our server and system administration careers. We also asked friends, who asked their friends, and we were therefore able to get some great contributions from others to augment the things that we'd come up with. Everybody has problems they like to solve. Bill likes distributed authentication, undeleting and recovering files, and tweaking filesystems in general. Brian likes making admin tasks more efficient, reliable, and repeatable; has a bucketload of cool scripts to do various tasks; and loves getting and using data from remote sources. And every sysadmin has favorite techniques for solving problems, so Hack is to Hacker as Cool Tip or Technique is to Server or System Administrator. Sysadmin hacks are essentially clever ways of approaching whatever problem you're trying to solve, whether it's figuring out how to recover lost data, trying to collect information from distributed clients in one place so that you can easily see the big picture or anything else that comes up.

As we worked on this book, thinking about cool server and sysadmin hacks mutated into thinking about general tips and tricks that we found useful to simplify our lives as system administrators. We also noticed that there weren't really any books available along the lines of "Things We Wish Previous System Administrators Had Told Us." Leaving aside obvious questions like "where is the key to the RAID array" and "what was the root password on ," we decided to "hack the Hacks series" a bit and incorporate some general sysadmin information, tips, and tricks as another of this book's primary themes. This means that we provide a bit more background material than you ordinarily see in Hacks books. You're not going to hurt our feelings if you skip over things you already know, but we hope that all the material will be found useful by some of our readers. We could have used it years ago, and as Mr. Rogers used to say, "It's nice to share."