Chapter 3. Working with CentOS

In this chapter, we will cover:

• Creating an administrative user and becoming root with the switch user command

• Introducing mailx and forwarding the root's e-mail to an external address

• Automating tasks with cron

• Synchronizing files and directories with rsync and working towards a full system backup with cron

• Issuing customized e-mail reports with Mutt

• Using logrotate to manage logfiles

• Extending log rotation by adding NTP to logrotate

• Enabling a custom service at boot

• Evaluating current memory usage with the free and top commands and clearing the memory cache