Chapter 3. System administration

Recognizing that there are many Linux administration guides and most everyday administration tasks are covered by SuSE Administration Guide provided on the distribution CDs, in this chapter we concentrate on a brief introduction to local and cluster system administration. We describe the administration tools on a Linux system and discuss user administration issues, logical volume management and selected network topics. We also describe system update and system backup possibilities.

With or without CSM, a cluster or enterprise environment with more than a single Linux system will challenge an administrator. Administration of many network systems can be just a sum of single system administration tasks, but in this case there will be many perpetual and repeated steps. For effective enterprise system administration, you need tools that will focus these tasks at a single point of control and accomplish them once for the whole cluster.

We will use DHCPD for dynamic address configuration, BIND for name resolution, and LDAP or file distribution for user management. An environment built with these tools remains flexible, and adding new nodes is no additional effort.

We provide step-by-step instruction on how to get these tools running. All the configuration files were tested in our environment and should be able to serve your needs with only minor changes.