Systems Administration: Server and Process Behavior
Channel: Linux.conf.au 2013 -- Canberra, Australia
Date: 2014-11-23

Presenter(s): Mark Smith
URL: http://lca2013.linux.org.au/schedule/30277/view_talk

It would be wonderful if servers and programs would just work and never break. Until that magical day, though, we need to be prepared. Whether you are a junior sysadmin new to the trade or an engineer at a startup who also has to run servers, this tutorial has something for you.

We will be covering the basics of gathering information about a server, what it's doing, and how to do seat-of-the-pants estimates on performance. We will discuss and analyze servers misbehaving in typical ways as well as get some ideas on useful ways to think about debugging a server.

From there we will do some exercises in spotting problems and debugging running processes. We will also explore side-channel analysis as a tool for intuiting what a process is doing. Typical failure patterns will be discussed and analyzed, and you will have a chance to do some hands-on debugging.

Requirements: a laptop, an SSH client, and a basic knowledge of Linux and how to use a shell (bash/zsh).

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