Knowing and managing your background services

Linux system services are one of the most fundamental concepts of every Linux server. They are programs which run continuously in your system, waiting for external events to process something or do it all the time. Normally, when working with your server, a system user will not notice the existence of such a running service because it is running as a background process and is therefore not visible. There are many services running all the time on any Linux server. These can be a web server, database, FTP, SSH or printing, DHCP, or LDAP server to name a few. In this recipe, we will show you how to manage and work with them.

Getting ready

To complete this recipe, you will require a working installation of the CentOS 7 operating system with root privileges, a console-based text editor of your choice, and a connection to the Internet to facilitate the download of additional packages. Some commands shown here use less navigation in their output. Read...