Learn Linux The SUSE Way

Yes, you heard it right. SUSE has been doing a good thing in enabling enterprise sector to be technically capable enough to cater to the needs. That’s right. SUSE has been conducting free technical training plus certifications to partner companies. They also would ready to go to the respective locations of the partner to deliver training's*.

This is significantly a different & great approach when compared with its competitors. Definitely, the company SUSE has been investing a lot on this approach. Anyone who is interested and wish to skill up would certainly could register for required course and start learning. There is also an option to learn online as well. 

Main Differences Between RHEL & SLES

	Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)	SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)
Owned By	Red Hat Red Hat, Inc is an American MNC with head office in Raleigh, North Carolina (USA). It was founded in March 26th 1993. Now, it has been acquired by IBM.	SUSE It is a German based software MNC, founded in 1992 and headquarter located at Nuremberg, Germany.

Steps to fix or resolve Error 15 or Error 17 or No files under /boot.

We get to see “Error 15” or “Error 17” when the ‘/boot’ file system is corrupted, so system fails to boot up. This is mainly because of primary boot loader files missing or not found. It could also be possible that the ‘/boot’ file system has been overwritten or formatted by mistake. 

Common Debugging Methods In Linux

The top 6 common debugging methods in Linux.

( 1 ) Increase logging verbosity

As usual, in Linux systems we could look out for errors/warnings/info related messages in "/var/log/messages" file. By default only ‘info’ ( information) and above messages gets logged in to this file, so to increase this logging verbosity one could edit the configuration line of "/var/log/messages" in "/etc/rsyslog.conf" file.

Change this line from :

*.info;mail.none;authpriv.none;cron.none                /var/log/messages

to

*.debug;mail.none;authpriv.none;cron.none                /var/log/messages

After making this change, save and exit the file. Restart the “rsyslogd” service ( 'systemctl restart rsyslog.service' or 'service rsyslog restart' in case of RHEL6.x and older) to make the changes come into effect. NOTE: Keep in mind that this would generate a lot of logs and "/var" may get filled up fast, so after the diagnosis make sure to revert the changes.

What Is Firewalld & How To Configure Rules?

In this post we’d talk about ‘firewalld’ and it is benefits and how to get it configured in RHEL7 and above systems.

A Note on netfilter

In Linux ‘netfilter’ is being used which is a powerful network filtering sub-system. This allows kernel modules to inspect each packet traversing the system, and it could be dropped or rejected or allowed in a programmatic way and this applies to all incoming, outgoing and forwarded packets. So, in earlier RHEL6.x version we had ‘iptables’ which is a well-known netfilter program. However, in RHEL7.x version and above we've ‘firewalld’ in-place of ‘iptables’.

Let's Automate System Health Check In Linux

Most of the modern day applications uses virtual systems which are cloud based hosted by some popular cloud service providers such as Amazon, Google, Azure, Verizon etc,. Since these systems are provisioned and maintained by the cloud service providers, the task of a Linux Administrator has gone reduced. Gone are the days when a Linux Admin spends hours of time in analyzing crash dump to understand the symptoms of reboot/crash and finding out ways to tune the system. So, in this virtual world, application vendors doesn't really bothered or interested if a virtual machine crashes, because they get to host the services on another virtual system with absolutely zero or minimal downtime. All such tasks of maintaining virtual systems are done by cloud providers. Hence, from application perspective there are no worries as such. However, there are times when it is required to track/monitor a Linux system health which is hosting some applications.