Preface
Linux is an exciting platform. You can literally find it everywhere—desktops, laptops, phones, embedded appliances, and especially servers. Linux servers power many famous technologies around the world, and have a massive presence in physical and cloud server environments. Linux servers are scalable, stable, and powerful.
Way back in 1991, a computer science student in Finland, named Linus Torvalds, created a kernel as a school project. He created the Linux kernel. And little did he know at the time, Linux would see us through some of the most exciting innovations in infrastructure design. Things like multicore processors, virtualization, containerization, and cloud computing (to name a few) have transformed data centers all over the world. And Linux has been a part of all of those advancements.
Ubuntu, a popular distribution of Linux, has been a major driving force in the adoption of Linux. Ever since its first release back in 2004, Ubuntu has made Linux more approachable for newcomers, while simultaneously offering powerful features to server administrators. Ubuntu can be found on notebooks and workstations, in addition to servers.
Ubuntu Server enables administrators to create efficient, flexible, and highly available servers that empower organizations with the power of open source. As Ubuntu administrators, we’re in good company—according to W3Techs, Ubuntu is the most widely deployed distribution on the web with regard to Linux. With the release of Ubuntu 22.04, this platform becomes even more exciting!
In this book, we will dive right into Ubuntu Server, and you will learn all the concepts needed to manage your servers and configure them to perform all kinds of neat tasks, such as serving web pages, managing virtual machines, running containers, automating configuration, sharing files with other users, and even running Ubuntu in the cloud.
We’ll start our journey with the first chapter, where we’ll walk through the installation of Ubuntu Server 22.04, which will serve as a foundation for the rest of the book. As we proceed through our journey, we’ll look at managing users, connecting to networks, and controlling processes. Later, we’ll implement important technologies, such as DHCP, DNS, Apache, MariaDB, and more. We’ll even set up our own Nextcloud server along the way.
Finally, the end of the book covers various things we can do to troubleshoot issues, as well as preventing and recovering from disasters.
