Introduction

Welcome to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Administration Guide.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Administration Guide contains information on how to customize your Red Hat Enterprise Linux system to fit your needs. If you are looking for a step-by-step, task-oriented guide for configuring and customizing your system, this is the manual for you. This manual discusses many intermediate topics such as the following:

This manual is divided into the following main categories:

This guide assumes you have a basic understanding of your Red Hat Enterprise Linux system. If you need help installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Installation Guide. For more general information about system administration, refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Introduction to System Administration. If you need more advanced documentation such as an overview of file systems, refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Reference Guide. If you need security information, refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Security Guide.

HTML, PDF, and RPM versions of the manuals are available on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Documentation CD and online at http://www.redhat.com/docs/.

NoteNote
 

Although this manual reflects the most current information possible, read the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Release Notes for information that may not have been available prior to our documentation being finalized. They can be found on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux CD #1 and online at http://www.redhat.com/docs/.

1. Changes to This Manual

The previous version of this manual was named the Red Hat Linux Customization Guide. It has been renamed the Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Administration Guide to better reflect the topics discussed as well as to more clearly define its role in the Red Hat documentation set.

It has been expanded to include new features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 as well as topics requested by our readers. Significant changes to this manual include:

Chapter 7 User-Defined Device Names

This new chapter explains how to use devlabel.

Chapter 8 Access Control Lists

This new chapter explains the how to use access control lists for files and directories.

Chapter 9 Kickstart Installations

This chapter has been updated to include new kickstart directives.

Chapter 10 Kickstart Configurator

This chapter has been updated to include the new options in Kickstart Configurator.

Chapter 14 PXE Network Installations

This new chapter explains how to perform a PXE installation.

Chapter 15 Diskless Environments

This new chapter explains how to create a diskless environment.

Chapter 24 Samba

This chapter has been updated for Samba 3.0 and now explains how to mount Samba shares.

Chapter 32 Keyboard Configuration

This new chapter explains the Keyboard Configuration Tool.

Chapter 33 Mouse Configuration

This new chapter explains the Mouse Configuration Tool.

Chapter 34 X Window System Configuration

This new chapter explains the X Configuration Tool.

Chapter 38 Log Files

This chapter has been updated to explain the new features of Log Viewer.

Chapter 39 Upgrading the Kernel

This chapter has been updated to explain the new kernel packages as well as how to upgrade the kernel on architectures other than x86.

Chapter 43 OProfile

This new chapter explains the how to use the OProfile system profiler.