Ensight - Jeremy Wright’s Personal Blog

Getting My Linux Groove On

by Jeremy Wright on October 26th, 2005

While I’ve never been “anti-Linux” (I believe it’s one of the best OS’s in the world, particularly for single-purpose servers like webservers, caching, etc)… I’ve never had to personally manage or personally use Linux to any degree. The extent of my Linux knowledge was that “cd” was change directory, “top” showed me what was going on with the machine and “ls” showed the contents of directories.

In the last week, though, I’ve had to become more accustomed than ever, thanks to some issues with the b5media server.

While I’m not exactly a powerhouse, I’ve figured out how to (with help from friends, Google, etc):

- make my way around directories, copy files, view filetypes, edit text files using vi, etc
- work with top and ps and various other tools to figure out what’s going on with a server
- reconfigure apache and mysql, in fairly basic ways, to optimize how they work
- setup a cron job
- kill, maime and otherwise do serious damage to runaway processes

And a variety of other minor tasks. I’m all impressed with myself, obviously. Not sure I enjoy Linux (anymore than I’d enjoy working with DOS again), but then this is all server stuff and I’m not sure how much “server stuff” can actually be fun (though I do love buying and setting up hardware).

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POSTED IN: Humor, IT News & Thoughts