Documents for system administrators
This page contains some links to documents that are of use for system
administrators. Not all of the documents are necessarily installed.
Sysadmins should look especially at manual page
section 8.
The LDP books Network Administrators' Guide and System Administrators'
Guide (draft) are important.
Software installation
The Debian package management tools are
dselect,
and
dpkg.
With them, it is quite simple to install, upgrade, and uninstall
programs.
For programs installed from source, you usually need to use
make
or
imake.
You may need some programming skills to compile some programs,
if they haven't been ported to Linux already. Read the README
or other documentation for each package for closer details.
Backups and archives
Traditional tools for making backups are
tar,
cpio, and
dump.
Also available for Debian are
afio,
tob, and
taper.
These tools can also be used for archiving. They're mostly intended
for tape drives.
User administration
Users are created with
adduser,
groups with
addgroup.
There are currently no good tools for removing either, you have
to edit /etc/passwd and /etc/group by hand.
In Debian, each user `foo' has his own group `foo'.
Most other Unix systems are different. You may want to read
the reason for this.
This page is part of dwww.