Linux Service Management Made Easy with systemd: Advanced techniques to effectively manage, control, and monitor Linux systems and services

by Donald A. Tevault

A comprehensive guide for teaching system administrators, developers, and security professionals how to create their own systemd units and maintain system security Linux Service Management Made Easy with systemd will provide you with an in-depth understanding of systemd, so that you can set up your servers securely and efficiently. This is a comprehensive guide for Linux administrators that will help you get the best of systemd, starting with an explanation of the fundamentals of systemd management. You'll also learn how to edit and create your own systemd units, which will be particularly helpful if you need to create custom services or timers and add features or security to an existing service. Next, you'll find out how to analyze and fix boot-up challenges and set system parameters. An overview of cgroups that'll help you control system resource usage for both processes and users will also be covered, alongside a practical demonstration on how cgroups are structured, spotting the differences between cgroups Version 1 and 2, and how to set resource limits on both. Finally, you'll learn about the systemd way of performing time-keeping, networking, logging, and login management. You'll discover how to configure servers accurately and gather system information to analyze system security and performance. By the end of this Linux book, you'll be able to efficiently manage all aspects of a server running the systemd init system. This book is best suited for Linux administrators who want to learn more about maintaining and troubleshooting Linux servers. It will also be useful for aspiring administrators studying for a Linux certification exam, developers looking to learn how to create systemd unit files, and security administrators who want to understand the security settings that can be used in systemd units and how to control resource usage with cgroups. Before you dive into this book, you'll need a solid working knowledge of basic Linux commands.

Genres: Technology

420 pages, Paperback

Published February 3, 2022

Reviews

[Matvey Aksenov · Rating 2 out of 5]

As per usual for Packt Publishing, the book is in a dire need for editing. You can tell the author have tried, but there's still a lot of typos and some stuff that's just weird.

The author calls his work "the world's first comprehensive book about systemd", but that's obviously not true. In fact, anyone familiar with the extent of systemd would think the notion of writing a comprehensive book about it in just 400 pages laughable.

Maybe the book is mostly targeted to admin/devops/SRE/whatever-type of people. As a developer, I didn't find a lot of useful information I wouldn't gather from tinkering with the technology for a couple evenings. Actually, I'm more puzzled why the init system would need hostname management, cron reimplementation, logging subsystem, ntpd-lite daemon, dns resolver and network manager than before picking the book up.

[Jyri-Matti Lähteenmäki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice introduction of systemd. Doesn’t go too deep, but covers enough to be useful. Easy to read, though I’d prefer a bit less chatty approach.

[Alexander Isayenko · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a Linux Administrator I found this book handful in understanding the concepts of systemd. Sometimes I feel like going more into details, which book doesn't. In any case it gives you good understanding of configuring the system with units: service, path, socket, targets, timers.

After the description of principles behind systemd the Author covers the following components:

systemd-timedated replaces cron
systemd-journald replaces rsyslog
systemd-networkd replaces NetworkManager
systemd-resolved replaces /etc/resolve.conf
systemd-teimsyncd replaces ntpd
systemd-boot replaces grub
systemd-logind

As a separate part the author also covers a feature of Linux kernel called cgroups.