Day to Day Commands For Server : Cloud Server Administration

There is difference between the way we administer a cloud server and dedicated server. Here Are Useful, Regularly Updated Day to Day Commands For Server, This is Specially Written For Cloud Server Administration or VPS Instance. The difference between a cloud server and dedicated server from point of administration is mostly one higher level of access, backup strategies, no way to blow away physical server, almost always present invisible network monitoring by host even in unmanaged cloud server etc.

Day to Day Commands For Server : Introduction

This guide is intended for the new sysadmins, for the devops/sysops, for webmasters with few unmanaged servers. All of them are used with how to perform SSH to writing basic shell scripts. Commonly they can not identify attacks like we described for fake PHP-FPM error for XMLRPC attack or SSH brute attacks.

Frankly, what virtualization is running is very important. OpenStack has the advantage of having virtual router like we described in the tutorial for HP Cloud, there is OpenStack backup to immediately change IP, take whole server backup etc. VMWare also has many options.

Day to Day Commands For Server As a Part of Cloud Server Administration

There are few tools that will help you assuming you know the basics :

1. rsync
2. sar / iostat
3. setfacl / getfacl
4. curl and/or wget
5. iptables
6. who / last / w
7. top / htop
8. uptime
9. cron / crontab
10. ps
11. vmstat
12. free
13. strace
14. mtr

Running man <name in the above list> will give an idea what they do. If we SSH to a server, we need to do few works after login, one of them is not blindly running update, upgrade command on hurry particularly without backup. These we commonly run :

The above commands gives an idea of what is going on our server plus crontab is frequently abused by the hackers. It is very important to check the log files by going to /var/log directory. You can use scripts with complex commands for analysis of complex commands like we age example for fail2ban log analysis. Also we can check the packages installed on a distro like Ubuntu with complicated command. GoAccess is a powerful tool. We talked about security stuffs in separate article.

Nothing really enough to list all possible checking for a given system. Again, take a backup before updating your server. It is worthy to ask you to read how to upgrade Linux kernel.