Introduction

This chapter is a collection of recipes that introduces you to the process of running and maintaining an enterprise class server by introducing you to a series of starting points that considers how to approach creating an administrative user and becoming root with the switch user command; introducing mailx and forwarding 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.