Your linux environment and day to day tasks

Posted by sparcmo@reddit | linuxadmin | View on Reddit | 8 comments

Hi All.

Please share your most common day to day functions on linux servers as a linux admin.
IE, managing user or permissions. managing njinx and so on.
If you are willing please share what you are doing.
Lets day allowing ports to the web server running on X web server on X linux distro.

Im trying to compile most used linux management functions and most used linux apps in business environments. Google keeps giving me stuff like ls and ip addr and so on but I need something that is a bit more relevant to an actual linux sys admin's day to day.

The more info the better.
Also Im a long time Windows server engineer / network engineer and I can google my way around linux but I have never worked on linux in a business environment so hoping the real OGs can share some info here.

Thanks all.

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serverhorror@reddit

Write scripts and software to automate the tasks coming in.

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chkno@reddit

You're only 'on the servers' when something has gone very, very wrong.

Normally, you're determining what to next push to the servers. This happens on your local machine, usually a laptop. Concretely, this looks like editing text files, running tests, and then pushing out the changes you have made to the text files.

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Ancient-Bat1755@reddit

Crying inside, and learning as I go.

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michaelpaoli@reddit

Meh, all kinds of semi-random stuff.

Most of it not exactly highly memorably, but thinking backwards chronologically of most recent things that required root access that I immediately recall at present:

setup and demonstrated some sftp only configurations (and then cleaned that up)
applied some software upgrades (mostly if not entirely to fix security bugs)
diagnosed and fixed a TZ related issue and demonstrated that it was fixed
obtained and updated a bunch of TLS(/"SSL") certs

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whamra@reddit

I'm an engineer in a saas company. Half my work is actual development, mostly in bash. We have intricate custom setups we provide to our customers. I use Ansible extensibly, and building/modifying Ansible roles is a big chunk of my dev work. In a role like this, you have to be a jack of all trades. I work with nginx, I work with Prometheus, dockers, debian packaging, etc.. We have forks of so many popular tools, so I also need to know how to build programs written in Go, nodejs, C, and many others. I build them, package them, and publish them to our ppa, so I also need familiarity with how launchpad works.

Some of our servers are redhat, so I also package for them.

In dev work, I'm all over the place but none of that is really expected of me. But it's certainly why I still have the job :)

That was all just half my day. The other half is maintenance. Disks go bad. Scripts fail. Cloudflare fails. A colleague destroys something by accident. A customer screws us in some new way we never envisioned. We run a very detailed monitoring system and I spend half my day fixing things and writing documentation for others where user error is the problem.

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sparcmo@reddit (OP)

Thanks for this - very insightful.

If you dont mind can you share a few things you do from ansible. If you are willing to share a description of some of your playbooks?

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SurfRedLin@reddit

This i pretty similar to my job as well. Lot of ansible, bit of softmare testing thrown in. We also do bare metal so IaC for that is cool. Also a bit of product development.

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CardOk755@reddit

The whole point of computers is to automate repetitive tasks.

If you are spending time on server administration you are not doing it right.