Next steps for system administration

Posted: Oct 28, 2013 - Modified: Oct 25, 2013| geek

System administration is one of those things that is useful to get better at before you need it. I’ve got a lot to learn in this area. For starters, I need to set up solid backups before I can let other people into my servers to help me. That way, even if things go haywire, I should be able to get things back in order. Once that’s sorted out, I can move on to tweaking my memory and server configuration so that I can make my website more responsive, and I can work on improving my web site.

So much to do, one step at a time… =)

You can view 7 comments or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

7 comments

Erik

2013-10-28T13:47:07Z

Hi Sacha,

I use Back in time, https://launchpad.net/~bit-...

It is a really nice backup software based on rsync. You can make automatic backups set to go through once /day , hour, 30 mins etc. You can make backups to off site via ssh. You can choose any file / directory snapshot you like to recreate data from. There are some clever things going on in this software. (And it is free and open source).

A major advantage is that they have a very friendly forum for questions as well. All questions have so far been answered.

The above address is to the developers private repository, since the versions in Debian/Ubuntu repos are lagging behind.

/Erik

sachac

2013-10-28T15:18:41Z

Thanks! This looks great for Linux systems. For my Windows laptop, I've been using Create Synchronicity, which seems kinda like Rsync. =) Details next week!

akamaozu

2013-10-28T15:32:29Z

Super useful list I'd love to mirror! Do share your adventures in learning these things .. I for one would be eternally grateful for it :)

sachac

2013-11-01T22:11:12Z

So far so good! I now have a backup VM and a dev VM, I've turned on caching for this blog, and I have a new 1 TB external drive for backups that should free up the hard drive in another enclosure so that I can do offsite backups and image restore testing.

Jay Dugger

2013-11-03T12:39:38Z

For a better guide to system administration, see "System Administration For Cyborgs."

sachac

2013-11-04T03:02:34Z

Oooh. Thanks for the recommendation!

Jay Dugger

2013-11-05T02:16:29Z

You're welcome. I hope you find it helpful, just as I've found your blog's recommendations helpful.