Linux Servers in Production
Boot, Storage, Networking, and Operations on Any Distribution.
Planned
A Linux server is the same machine under every distribution: one kernel, one storage stack, one network stack, and an init system that ties them together. This book will cover that shared layer: how a server gets from firmware to a login prompt, how disks become filesystems, how packets are routed and names resolved, and what operators do to keep it all patched and recoverable.
Status: planned title. Writing has not started. The repository and the cover exist; the scope below is the plan.
The first edition will ship DRM-free as PDF and EPUB, with free updates.
The server, layer by layer.
No chapters are written yet. This is the plan: the areas the book will cover, in the order a reader would meet them. It covers what current mainstream distributions have in common and points out where the families differ.
- Boot and init The chain from firmware to a running system: UEFI, bootloaders, the initramfs, and the init system that starts services.
- Storage Disks, partitions, LVM, filesystems, and mounts, and what to do when one of them fails.
- Networking Interfaces, addressing, routing, and name resolution, with the host firewall in front of them.
- Services and logs How daemons are started, supervised, and restarted, and where their output ends up.
- Distribution families What the Debian, Red Hat, and SUSE families share, where they differ, and how their package managers behave.
- Operations Monitoring, updates, backup and restore, and the routine maintenance that keeps a server dependable.
For engineers who keep Linux servers running.
This book is for people who run or inherit Linux servers, on any distribution. It assumes comfort with the command line and explains the model behind each subsystem rather than listing per-distribution recipes.
- Sysadmins and platform engineers who run servers across the Debian, Red Hat, or SUSE families and want one model that covers all of them.
- Developers who deploy to Linux servers and want to understand what the machine does at boot, on disk, and on the wire.
- Operators who inherit servers they did not build and need to work out how the machine boots and where its state lives.
Planned.
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