Systems Administration: Server and Process Behavior
| Wiki Page: | Systems Administration: Server and Process Behavior | ||||
It would be wonderful if servers and programs would just work and never break. Until that magical day, though, we need to be prepared. Whether you are a junior sysadmin new to the trade or an engineer at a startup who also has to run servers, this tutorial has something for you.
We will be covering the basics of gathering information about a server, what it's doing, and how to do seat-of-the-pants estimates on performance. We will discuss and analyze servers misbehaving in typical ways as well as get some ideas on useful ways to think about debugging a server.
From there we will do some exercises in spotting problems and debugging running processes. We will also explore side-channel analysis as a tool for intuiting what a process is doing. Typical failure patterns will be discussed and analyzed, and you will have a chance to do some hands-on debugging.
Requirements: a laptop, an SSH client, and a basic knowledge of Linux and how to use a shell (bash/zsh).
Mark Smith
Mark is a little bit of everything. He's done time as a software engineer, a MySQL DBA, a sysadmin, and even managed an operations team. He's worked for the likes of Google and Mozilla, started a successful open source project, and somehow still finds time to have two small children and a cat.
In his free time, he likest to write code in Perl, Go, and Python. He believes strongly in the Oxford comma and wishes to move back to Iceland one day.
