What this book covers

Chapter 1, Taming vi, will make sure that you are fully versed in the shortcuts that exist to make your shell quickly navigable before entering into the realms of mastering vi. You may have some experience with vi but most often, I find that the experience has not been a good one. I am going to make sure that you are the master of vi and not vice versa.

Chapter 2, Cold Starts, is all about understanding the boot process in CentOS and learning how to not only modify the GRUB menu to make it more secure, but also how to use the GRUB command line to debug and repair boot issues. We will include a little boot splashing with Plymouth as well as explain when the root filesystem is not actually the root filesystem.

Chapter 3, CentOS Filesystems – A Deeper Look, tells us that we have files and directories but they are all just different file types. However, when it comes to links, pipes, and sockets, we will discuss what they are and how they are used. Regarding links, we will discuss what is the difference between a hard and soft link. Let's also challenge the traditional filesystem design; you may have worked with logical volumes manager (LVM) in the past, but let me tell you just how last century that is. You are going to be blown away by the power and ease of your enterprise filesystem management using BTRFS, pronounced as Better FS.

Chapter 4, YUM – Software Never Looked So Good, gets you to grips with YUM repositories and software management; you are going to love this. You will learn how to download packages without installing them, thus allowing you to easily distribute packages in your enterprise. If this is not good enough, then you'll learn how to set up a local repository to share packages across your LAN and create your own RPMs.

Chapter 5, Herding Cats – Taking Control of Processes, tells us that too often, administrators, without the insight that you and I have, will leave services running that aren't required, and do not understand the tools they have to manage processes. You will learn here to control services and processes using upstart and traditional service scripts as well as become homicidal with the kill and pkill weapons of choice.

Chapter 6, Users – Do We Really Want Them?, tells us, of course, that we do not want them (users) on our system, but it is often dictated, so we have little choice. Rather than be grumpy about this, you will learn how to manage users with a smile and keep them on a tight rein.

Chapter 7, LDAP – A Better Type of User, tells us that rather than having silos of users and groups on each machine, it is better to get back on the golf course by spending more time improving the system and less time managing users. Adding users to a central directory and sharing them across all systems as required is your gateway to freedom.

Chapter 8, Nginx – Deploying a Performance-centric Web Server, tells us that commonly, Linux administrators and publications concentrate on the Apache web server; I will introduce you to the new kid on the block, Nginx (pronounced Engine X). Introduced in 2004, Nginx is rapidly taking market share from Apache and has already surpassed IIS in a number of deployed web servers worldwide. We will deploy Nginx and PHP.

Chapter 9, Puppet – Now You Are the Puppet Master, shifts our focus from Linux in the enterprise to taking control of your enterprise systems with the renowned Puppet software from Puppet Labs. Central configuration control is as good as centralized user management in giving you more time to spend on the golf course, not that I want you to think that golf dominates my life.

Chapter 10, Security Central, introduces you to Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM). It is your friend and will help you manage when and how users connect. SELinux, again, is a friend, albeit a temperamental one. When treated well, it will help you ensure correct use of your system. You will learn how to harden your Linux system and gain a set of best practices!

Chapter 11, Graduation Day, tells us that as we prepare to leave with our newfound skills, we will remind ourselves the need for security and adhere to the best practices. We can revisit some of the products that we have seen before, such as Puppet and Nginx, and outline some industry-recognized guidelines for the deployment of these services, along with some of the new features of CentOS 7.