Chapter 8. System Maintenance

Whether you're just running your own system and want maximum flexibility and performance, or are responsible for delivering a wide variety of applications and capabilities to multiple users, you need a wide variety of skills to maintain a Linux system. One of the annoyances covered in this chapter can help you speed up your system; others prevent serious headaches down the line when users outgrow the disk space you've assigned them or when you have to upgrade software that contains dependencies on other software. Finally, there are solutions to annoyances included that people will remember and thank you for, as when you recover data they thought they'd lost forever from a failing disk.

In this chapter, I illustrate some of the annoyances related to maintaining a Linux system.