With the advent of cloud computing and the growing popularity of the Linux open source platform for running the cloud, many system admins who are well versed and firmly established in the Microsoft Windows environment are finding themselves having the need to branch out further and further into the Linux hosting world. Whether it is for one small application that requires Linux and therefore runs on a single isolated server in your data center or a large implementation of virtual hosting that requires administration of several virtual environments for several clients, Linux exists in just about every major data center at this point. Linux Red Hat is often considered the backbone of the cloud computing world. This is so prevalent that Microsoft has announced this summer that it will start supporting Linux within its Azure cloud computing environment. Here are a few tips for Windows administrators who wish to make the move to Linux.
Rethinking File System Organization
The first thing the Windows administrators will need to get used to in Linux, or with any Unix based operating system for that matter, is the absence of drive letters. This requires a change in how you think about file system architecture, but can actually be extremely useful once you get the hang of it. While Windows deals with hard partitions based on drive letters, such as C: and D:, the Linux file system is built on completely configurable file system directories beginning with the basic level access called root, signified by a backslash. Once you learn the basics of the file system layout such as root, etc, tmp, usr, and sbin you can start to explore the possibilities presented by the mount function. This is extremely handy for attaching and detaching virtual drives, physical media drives and logical partitions.
User Administration
User administration between Windows and Linux can cause some difficulty to novice Linux users. The first thing to remember is that in Linux, groups are assigned based on system resource instead of business unit. This is an important distinction since only one group can be assigned to one system resource. For this reason, it is common to have many more groups in Linux than in Windows. Also, we would hope that you would have been using good administration practices and keeping your Windows Administrator accounts separate from your other users, but in Linux it is extremely important to not use your Root account (the Administrator account) for day to day activities. If you are still getting used to the command line nature of Linux, you can also use a tool called Webmin to provide a graphic user interface for your user administration duties.
Backup and Recovery
One of the great advantages to the Linux file system architecture is the ease of backup and recovery activities. With the Windows environment, the core system is completely reliant on the system registry. For this reason, when you need to do a backup of a system, it is necessary to back up the entire registry and associated partitions. With Linux, there is no central registry which makes it much easier to back up individual mounted directories and attach or reattach them as needed. Linux is more concerned with backing up directories through packaging and unpackaging files that can be fairly stand alone without concerning itself with the intricacies of the underlying file system such as Windows FAT32 and NTFS layouts. It is good to keep in mind that Linux does have a core set of directories that administrators will want to include in their back up plans however, and these include: /etc, /var, /home, /root, and /opt.
Author Bio: This post is written by Jason Phillips, a freelance blogger and a content writer. He has written for various websites related to Linux and Linux record user activity.
