Ask HN: Server Management Best Practices

11 points by napcae 12y ago ↗ HN

So let's say you have a bunch(or just one) of servers. Is there any good guide or Best Practices on how to be actually a good admin? I'm asking for things like, how you document what software you installed, reporting and monitoring mechanisms/software etc. What do you use for backup and/or do you revision control your configuration files? I'm using an excel sheet at the moment, but I don't think that's the best way. Btw, I'm asking for UNIX systems, but I think most concepts should work also for other systems as well.

4 comments

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skimmas 12y ago ↗

I know this might is not the best approach but I also only manage one or two servers... http://plusbryan.com/my-first-5-minutes-on-a-server-or-essen...

napcae 12y ago ↗

This is almost the same I also did. Except I'm using iptables and logwatch seems good. I'll read it! Thank you

staunch 12y ago ↗

There is no canonical book that I know of. I'm sure there are some books though if you check Amazon for "Linux System Administration". They might not be a bad place to start.

I use rsync for backups. Storing configuration management files in Git works. Puppet and Chef are the most popular configuration management systems, they work just fine.

jacquesct 12y ago ↗

Chef for configuration files. Customisations for Chef Attributes are in a json.php file on the chef host that merges various things like specific settings for a datacenter, host role, etc.

Google Docs for certain information as well as a wiki. There are Standard Operating Proceedures (SOP's) for numerous tasks also in the wiki which explains things in detail.

Munin for graphing along with some metrics being polulated into Zabbix.