Servers for Hackers: Server Administration for Programmers

Servers can be fun!

Knowing how to setup, run and administer a server can be as empowering as coding itself!

Some application have needs stretching beyond what hosting providers can give.This shouldn’t stop us from building the application.

Servers can be hard!

Consumers expect and demand services to be functioning. Downtime can cost real money, and is often met with frustration and anger.

At the same time, servers are increasingly commodified. Hosting once involved a few, powerful servers. Now, the modern “Cloud” consists of many small,cheap virtual machines.Virtual machines commonly die for many reasons.

The end result is that we need to build for failure. This is a Hard Problem™, and requires us to know a lot about the servers running our applications.

This book exists because we developers are now faced with System Administration issues. We need to at least know the basics of what goes into hosting and serving our application!

So, let’s not get stuck with limiting hosting or a broken server!

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Servers
Chapter 2. Introduction
Chapter 3. Security
Chapter 4. Package Managers
Chapter 5. Permissions and User Management
Chapter 6. Webservers
Chapter 7. SSL Certificates
Chapter 8. Multi-Server Environments
Chapter 9. Logs
Chapter 10. File Management, Deployment & Configuration Management
Chapter 11. SSH
Chapter 12. Monitoring Processes
Chapter 13. Development and Servers