You’ve had the weekend to mentally prepare yourself for the first “workout” in our UNIX Sysadmin Boot Camp, so now that you’ve finished stretching your hammies, we’ll jump right into training. In Welcome to the Jungle, I talked about the command line as a fantastically powerful resource, so my goal is to help you wield that power.
Before you can do any actual wielding, you’re going to need to know how to find this exotic “command line” we’ve already talked so much about. Unless you managed to sneak your way through the layers upon layers of security and into your server’s data center, you won’t be able to plug a keyboard and monitor directly into your server. You do have access to the next best thing, though: the Secure Shell – or SSH – network protocol. SSH allows data to be exchanged securely between two networked devices, and when the “network” between your workstation and server is the Internet, the fact that it does so “securely” is significant.
Instructions to SSH into your server are included in your introductory information from The Planet, as well as in your Orbit interface. You can use a third-party client such as PuTTY, WinSCP if your workstation is Windows-based, or if you’re on Linux or Mac, you can access SSH from your terminal application: ssh user@ipaddress
. Once you’ve gotten into your server, you’ll probably want to find out where you are, so give the pwd
command a try:
user@serv: ~$ pwd/home/useruser@serv: ~$
It’s as easy as that. Now we know we’re in the /home/user
directory. Most of the time, you’ll find yourself starting in your home directory. This is where you can put personal files and documents. It’s kind of like “My Documents” in Windows, just on your server.
Now that you know where you are, you’ll probably want to know what’s in there. Take a look at these commands (extracted from a RedHat environment, but also usable in CentOS and many other distributions):
user@serv: /usr/src $ ls | This will give you a basic listing of the current directory. |
user@serv: /usr/src $ ls /usr/src/redhat | This will list the contents of another specified directory. |
user@serv: /usr/src $ ls ./redhat | Using a “relative pathname,” this will perform the same action as above. |
user@serv: /usr/src $ ls redhat | Most of the time, you’ll get the same results even without the “./ ” at the beginning. |
user@serv: /usr/src $ cd /usr/src/redhat/ | This is an example of using the cd command to change directories to an absolute pathname. |
user@serv: /usr/src $ cd redhat | This is an example of using the cd command to change directories to a relative pathname. |
user@serv: /usr/src/redhat $ cd /usr/src | To move back on directory from the working directory, you can use the destination’s absolute path. |
user@serv: /usr/src/redhat $ cd .. | Or, since the desired directory is one step down, you can use twp dots to move back. |
You’ll notice many similarities to the typical Windows DOS prompts, so it helps if you’re familiar with navigating through that interface: dir
, cd
, cd ..
, cd /
. Everything else on the other hand, will prove to be a bit different.
Now that you’re able to access this soon-to-be-powerful-for-you tool, you need to start learning the language of the natives: bash. In our next installment, we’ll take a crash course in bash, and you’ll start to get comfortable navigating and manipulating content directly on your server.
-Ryan
Related Posts:
- Lilah Brown's Planets, Part II (or, Season II preview) - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Snow White needs a bailout - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- To the moon - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- S/1 90482 (2005) needs your help - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- We'll always have Regulus - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Orcus Porcus - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Kant's Crowded Universe - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Look up! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Baby Pictures - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Encore: Yelping at Saints - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Godspeed - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Heavens above! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Homeward bound - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Sony Pictures and the end of the world - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Thank you from the future - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Lunar dreams - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The first of the Pluto books! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Don't try to blame it on Rio - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Rio roundup - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The long road to a Titan storm - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Planetary Placemats - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Fog! Titan! Titan Fog! (and a peer review experiment) - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Millard Canyon Memories - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The problem with science - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- P.S. on the problem with science - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- How Big is 10 TB? - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Showing You Your Servers - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Pick Your Partnership: Referral Partners, Resellers and Affiliates - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Server Form Factors: Towers v. Rack-Mounts - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Lights-Out in the Data Centers - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Disruptive Technologies: Virtualization and The Cloud - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Know Thy Backups – Part I - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Know Thy Backups – Part II - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Boo Bash 2009 – Desktop Costume Included! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Why No One Will Talk About “Cloud Computing” in 10 Years - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The end of the fall - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- We Love ‘Server Huggers’ - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- All About the Cloud: An Interview with Dell’s Cloud Evangelist - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Happy Solstice - December 21st, 2009 [December 21st, 2009]
- A ghost of Christmas past - December 31st, 2009 [December 31st, 2009]
- Learning from a Blender - January 5th, 2010 [January 5th, 2010]
- Changing my world - January 6th, 2010 [January 6th, 2010]
- A Server. From Scratch. - January 7th, 2010 [January 7th, 2010]
- The Planet Sand Castle: Upgrade Your Sandbox - January 12th, 2010 [January 12th, 2010]
- Hosting for Haiti - January 20th, 2010 [January 20th, 2010]
- Redefining Value - January 26th, 2010 [January 26th, 2010]
- My Experience as a Newbie at The Planet - January 28th, 2010 [January 28th, 2010]
- Confessions of Another New Planeteer - February 1st, 2010 [February 1st, 2010]
- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Permissions - February 11th, 2010 [February 11th, 2010]
- Where at The Planet is Rachel? - February 15th, 2010 [February 15th, 2010]
- The Planet Storage Cloud: FYI - February 19th, 2010 [February 19th, 2010]
- Meet us in March - February 25th, 2010 [February 25th, 2010]
- The Planet in “The Channel” - March 2nd, 2010 [March 2nd, 2010]
- The Planet Server Challenge - March 13th, 2010 [March 13th, 2010]
- The Definitive Guide to Finding The Planet at SXSW - March 13th, 2010 [March 13th, 2010]
- The SXSW Iron Geek Champion! - March 15th, 2010 [March 15th, 2010]
- Drinking from the Fire Hose - March 16th, 2010 [March 16th, 2010]
- The Fastest Hands at SXSW - March 17th, 2010 [March 17th, 2010]
- System.out.println(“Hello World!”); - March 22nd, 2010 [March 22nd, 2010]
- Westmere – Get it Here - March 23rd, 2010 [March 23rd, 2010]
- Orbit on Your iPhone: A Sign of Things to Come - March 24th, 2010 [March 24th, 2010]
- #ShowMeMyServer 2.0 - March 25th, 2010 [March 25th, 2010]
- Get to Know Your Visitors - March 30th, 2010 [March 30th, 2010]
- The Next Big Thing in Hosting: The Hostatulator - April 1st, 2010 [April 1st, 2010]
- Storage Cloud and the City - April 4th, 2010 [April 4th, 2010]
- American Heart – Why I Walk - April 7th, 2010 [April 7th, 2010]
- The Cake Shouldn’t Be a Lie - April 8th, 2010 [April 8th, 2010]
- April Showers Bring May Flowers - April 9th, 2010 [April 9th, 2010]
- First at The Planet: Nehalem EX 4-Socket Servers - April 15th, 2010 [April 15th, 2010]
- Intel Guest Blog: Xeon 5600 - April 16th, 2010 [April 16th, 2010]
- Inside the Office: A Birthday Surprise - April 18th, 2010 [April 18th, 2010]
- The Planet @ Cloud Expo East - April 19th, 2010 [April 19th, 2010]
- The Planet @ ad:tech SF - April 22nd, 2010 [April 22nd, 2010]
- ad:tech Server Challenge - April 22nd, 2010 [April 22nd, 2010]
- ad:tech Panel: Developing Communities Online - April 23rd, 2010 [April 23rd, 2010]
- The Planet @ Interop Las Vegas - April 27th, 2010 [April 27th, 2010]
- Overflowing With Value: 10TB is Back! - April 28th, 2010 [April 28th, 2010]
- The Cloud is NOT the Revolution - April 29th, 2010 [April 29th, 2010]
- The Importance of Orbit 2.0 - May 5th, 2010 [May 5th, 2010]
- The Planet @ Web 2.0 Expo - May 6th, 2010 [May 6th, 2010]