Wednesday, September 10, 2014

On Linux Server Documentation

1:42 PM    No comments

The following information about a server are what I usually take note of:
  1. Purpose
  2. Linux distribution version (lsb_release -a)
  3. Kernel version (uname -a)
  4. Processor information (cat /proc/cpuinfo)
  5. Memory information (cat /proc/meminfo)
  6. Disk partitions (fdisk -l)
  7. Network configuration (cat /etc/network/interfaces)
  8. Hostname (cat /etc/hostname)
  9. Hosts file (cat /etc/hosts)
  10. DNS Servers (cat /etc/resolv.conf)
  11. Allowed users/Sudoers  (cat /etc/passwd; cat /etc/sudoers)
  12. SSH server configuration (cat /etc/ssh/sshd_config )
  13. Firewall/IPTables settings ( iptables -L )
  14. APT sources ( cat /etc/apt/sources.list ) 
  15. Nagios settings
  16. Backup process (depends on the solution being used: rsync, bacula, etc. )
  17. more to follow...
If you know the specific function of the server, say a MySQL database server, document the configuration (/etc/my.cnf).

Don't forget to backup the config and the data!

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