

Ask HN: Server Management Best Practices - napcae

So let&#x27;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&#x27;m asking for things like, how you document what software you installed, reporting and monitoring mechanisms&#x2F;software etc. What do you use for backup and&#x2F;or do you revision control your configuration files? I&#x27;m using an excel sheet at the moment, but I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s the best way.  Btw, I&#x27;m asking for UNIX systems, but I think most concepts should work also for other systems as well.
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staunch
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.

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jacquesct
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.

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skimmas
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...](http://plusbryan.com/my-first-5-minutes-on-a-server-or-essential-
security-for-linux-servers)

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

