Chapter 4 . Learning Basic Administration 135 (Web hosting support) The
Chapter 4 . Learning Basic Administration 135 The advantage of plain-text files is that it s easy to read and change them. Any text editor will do. The downside, however, is that as you edit configuration files, no error checking is going on. You have to run the program that reads these files (such as a network daemon or the X desktop) to find out whether you set up the files correctly. A comma or a quote in the wrong place can sometimes cause a whole interface to fail. Throughout this book you ll find descriptions of the configuration files you need to set up the different features that make up Linux systems. The two major locations of configuration files are your home directory (where your personal configuration files are kept) and the /etc directory (which holds system-wide configuration files). Following are descriptions of directories (and subdirectories) that contain useful configuration files. (Refer to Table 4-1 for some individual configuration files in /etc that are of particular interest.) Viewing the contents of Linux configuration files can teach you a lot about administering Linux systems. . $HOME All users store information in their home directories that directs how their login accounts behave. Most configuration files in $HOME begin with a dot (.), so they don t appear as a user s directory when you use a standard ls command (you need to type ls -a to see them). There are dot files that define how each user s shell behaves, the desktop look-and-feel, and options used with your text editor. There are even files such as .ssh/* and .rhosts that configure network permissions for each user. (To see the name of your home directory, type echo $HOME from a shell.) . /etc This directory contains most of the basic Linux system-configuration files. Table 4-1 shows some /etc configuration files of interest. . /etc/cron* Directories in this set contain files that define how the crond utility runs applications on a daily (cron.daily), hourly (cron.hourly), monthly (cron.monthly), or weekly (cron.weekly) schedule. . /etc/cups Contains files that are used to configure the CUPS printing service. . /etc/default Contains files that set default values for various utilities. For example, the file for the useradd command defines the default group number, home directory, password expiration date, shell, and skeleton directory (/etc/skel) that are used when creating a new user account. . /etc/httpd Contains a variety of files used to configure the behavior of your Apache Web server (specifically, the httpd daemon process). (On some Linux systems, /etc/apache is used instead.) . /etc/init.d Contains the permanent copies of System V style run-level scripts. These scripts are often linked to files in the /etc/rc?.d directories to have each service associated with a script started or stopped for the particular run level. The ? is replaced by the run-level number (0 through 6). (Slackware puts its run-level scripts in the /etc/rc.d directory.) . /etc/mail Contains files used to configure your sendmail mail service.
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