The Best of Hack and /

Kyle Rankin wrote a monthly column titled "Hack and /" for Linux Journal magazine for almost 12 years starting in their January 2008 issue until Linux Journal closed for good on August 7, 2019. The column aimed to provide useful tips and tricks on topics ranging from system administration to security to 3D printing to VIM. After he published his final farewell article for Linux Journal, one of the most common questions he got was "what's going to happen to the giant archive of articles?" He realized he had a whole book's worth of material just in sysadmin tips alone.

This book doesn't aim to be an exhaustive guide to everything you need to know to be a system administrator. Instead, this book allows Rankin to act as a remote mentor to someone starting out in IT or system administration whether as a full-time job or as a full stack developer. Think of each section in a chapter like sitting down with him over lunch or looking over his shoulder as he shows you a tip to save you time, a tool he found useful, a lesson he learned the hard way, or an explanation of how he'd tackle a project you got assigned.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Sysadmin 101
- The Importance of Learning IT Fundamentals
- Leveling Up: A Sysadmin Career Path
- Automation
- Ticketing
- Patch Management
- Alerting
- Preparing for Vacation
- Travel Laptops Tips in Practice
Chapter 2 Sysadmin's Toolbox
- Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
- Scheduling One-time Jobs with At
- Sort and Uniq
- Tracking Bandwidth with Iftop
- Right Command, Wrong Server
- Chopping Logs
- Shorter Commands
- Add Progress Bars to dd
- Lock Files with the flock Command
Chapter 3 Home Servers
- Setting Up Your Network
- Setting Up A Home DNS Server
- A Local Mail Server
- Clustering with Raspberry Pis
- Home As Your Backup Data Center
Chapter 4 Server Projects
- Last Minute Secondary Mail Server
- Check Exchange from the Command Line
- Migrate to a New Hard Drive
- Remotely Wipe a Server
- Preseeding Full Disk Encryption
- Localhost DNS Cache
- PXE Magic
- More PXE Magic
Chapter 5 When Disaster Strikes
- Stop Killing Your Cattle
- Troubleshooting High Load
- Troubleshooting the Local Network
- Troubleshooting Remote Networks
- Troubleshooting with Telnet
- Collecting Server Metrics with Sar
- Dynamic DNS Disaster
- Troubleshoot Full Disks
- Hard Drive Crashes
- Recover the Master Boot Record
- Restoring Deleted Files

Appendices
A My Favorite Infrastructure

Sample Chapter: https://kylerank.in/bohs_lacc_sample_chapter.pdf